
"Cliosophic" Elssays 



I . THE POLITICAL REVOLUTION 
OF I860 

By JOHN W. APPEL, A.M. 



2. BUCHANAN'S ADMINISTRATION 

ON THE 

EVE OF THE REBELLION 

By W. U. HENSEL, A. M. 



3. ABRAHAM LINCOLN-The Problem. 
The Man. The SMution. 
By GEO. W. RICHARDS. D. D. 



LANCASTER. PA. 
MCMVni 



\ 



"CLIOSOPHIC" ESSAYS. 









>Vu, 



1 1 1^ 



PREFACE. 



The Cliosophic Society is a social and literary organiza- 
tion of Lancaster, Pa., founded in 1879. It is limited to 
about one hundred persons in number, representing some 
two score families, who entertain it at their convenience. 
The meetings are held fortnightly, from November to May. 
A topic for discussion— historical, literary or scientific— is 
generally selected for the winter, and at each meeting a 
paper, about an hour in length, is read upon some phase 
of the general subject; and a free discussion follows. The 
Society has consistently adhered to its original plan, and 
its vitality and the increasing interest manifested in its 
proceedings are a subject of constant satisfaction to its 
founders and its members generally. 

For 1907-8 the subject of study has been American 
History after the Compromise of 1850. In the course of 
this series, three papers were read which seemed to many 
who heard them to be so closely inter-related and to have 
such merit as to be worth preservation. Though most of 
the work of the Society has remained unpublished, many 
of the papers produced have been of exceptional worth 
as monographs on historical subjects, literary and art criti- 
cism and scientific or religious study. The essays here 
published together, and having some unity of theme, will 
help to illustrate the character of the Society's work, and 
may form a slight contribution to the voluminous but ever- 
increasing History of the Civil War Period. 



The Political Revolution of 1 860 



An Essay 

Read Before 

The Cliosophic Society, Lancaster, Pa. 
November 15, 1907 



By 

John W. Appel 



' Sail, sail thy best, ship of Democracy, 
Of value is thy freight, 'tis not the present only. 
The Past is also stored in thee." 

— Whitman. 



LANCASTER, PA. 
MCMVIII 



The Political Revolution of 1 860.' 



The middle of the last century marks the beginning of 
a new era in the history of our country. The States 
had been formed into a Union, but had not yet become a 
Nation. The principles of individual freedom and terri- 
torial expansion, as advocated by Thomas Jefferson, had 
held full sway for half a century and had borne rich fruit- 
age. John Marshall had defined the boundaries and set 
the limitations of constitutional povvers. Jackson had 
throttled nullification in its incipiency. Whig and Demo- 
crat had made a brilliant record for their country ; but they 
had reached the acme of their career and the old order was 
changing, yielding place to new. Webster and Clay and 
Calhoun had reached the summit of their fame, and a new 
coterie of patriots v^as being trained for the gigantic con- 
flict which lay dormant in the womb of the future. The 
old era ended with the administration of President Buch- 
anan and the new one began with the political revolution 
of 1860, which made Abraham Lincoln president. 

The causes which led to this revolution of political par- 
ties grew mainly out of the slavery question. With the 
history of that question is inwoven the record of the down- 
fall of the old Democratic party and the rise of the Repub- 
lican party. 

♦Abstract of the opening essay of The Cliosophic Society for the season 1907-08. 



4 THE POLITICAL REVOLUTION OF 1860. 

The conflict commenced with the beginning of the gov- 
ernment and increased in intensity until it reached its 
culmination in the greatest civil war of history. The 
stream which at its source showed only a few ripples as it 
flowed placidly along, became a raging torrent which no 
power could stem. 

The first compromise on the slavery question dates back 
to the formation of the Union. The terms of the compro- 
mise were that the slave trade should be permitted to con- 
tinue for twenty years ; that three-fifths of the slaves should 
be counted in the apportionment of representatives in Con- 
gress; and that fugitive slaves should be returned to their 
owners. It was only by making these concessions that it 
was possible to agree to a Union of the States. 

The next conflict occurred when Missouri applied for 
admission as a slave State into the Union. The South 
became defiant in its demands for the extension of the 
slave power, vrhile the North took a determined stand 
against it. The conflict for a time seemed most serious, 
and was only finally allayed by the famous Missouri Com- 
promise of 1820. This act admitted Missouri as a slave 
State, but with the provision that slavery should forever 
be prohibited north of 36° 31' in all the territory acquired 
from France by the Louisiana purchase. 

The act forms a landmark in the history of the slave 
question. As we view the situation now, in the light of 
subsequent history, it is plain that at that time already 
forces were at work that presaged the terrible conflict 
of after years. The South demanded the admission of 
Missouri as a slave State into the Union as a matter of right 
under the Constitution, while the North strenuously opposed 
it. 

The cotton industry became an important element in 
the controversy and added an economical, industrial and 



THE POLITICAL REVOLUTION OF 1860. O 

social phase to the question. It had given to the South 
untold wealth, and being a product of slave labor entirely, 
it demanded the extension of slavery as a necessary social 
and commercial institution. The discussion became most 
bitter. The North became arrayed against the South, 
and the great statesmen of revolutionary days viewed the 
situation with consternation and alarm. 

Henry Clay denied the constitutional power of Congress 
to impose conditions on newly-organized States in any way 
limiting their sovereign rights. Talmadge, of New York, 
spoke of slavery as "this monstrous scourge of the human 
race fraught with dire calamities to us as individuals and 
to our nation." William Pinkney's speech in the Senate 
was a brilliant effort. Clay thought it a " display of aston- 
ishing eloquence." His argument was based upon the 
doctrine of the sovereignty of the States. John Randolph 
denounced the compromise as a "dirty bargain," and 
called the Northern members who voted for it "dough 
faces." 

"This momentous question," wrote Jefferson, from 
Monticello, "like a fire-bell in the night, awakened and 
filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell 
of the Union." "The words civil war and disunion," -wTote 
Clay, "are uttered without emotion." 

The compromise was a Southern measure; but while it 
gave the South a slave State, it conceded the principle that 
Congress had power to prohibit slavery in the territories, 
which was a victory for the North. But peace was only 
temporary, for sectional animosities were aroused which 
were destined in the future to clash in the momentous 
conflict of 1860. 

When Texas and Oregon applied for admission to the 
Union, a very wide-spread agitation arose out of the discus- 
sion of an amendment to a bill providing for an appropria- 



6 THE POLITICAL REVOLUTION OF LS60. 

tion of $3,000,000, to be employed in negotiating a treaty 
with Mexico. The bill had in view the acquisition of a 
large amount of territory belonging to Mexico. David 
Wilmot, a Democratic representative from Pennsylvania, 
proposed the amendment. 

He asserted the necessity of the war, and avowed himself 
in favor of the acquisition of New Mexico and California; 
but he offered an amendment which declared it to be an 
express and fundamental condition to the acquisition of 
any territory from Mexico, that neither slavery nor in- 
voluntary servitude should ever exist therein. This amend- 
ment, known as the famoUs "Wilmot Proviso," "absorbed 
the attention of Congress for a longer time than the Mis- 
souri Compromise; it produced a wider and deeper excite- 
ment in the country and threatened a more serious danger 
to the peace and integrity of the Union. The consecration 
of the territory of the United States to freedom became 
from that day a rallying cry for every State of anti-slavery 
sentiment, and afforded the ground on which the battle of 
the giants was to be waged and possibly decided. It 
proved a sword which cleft asunder political associations 
that had been close and intimate for a lifetime." 

Mr. Webster voted for the proviso, but said that he could 
see little of the future, and that little gave him no satisfac- 
tion: "All I can scan is contention, strife and agitation. 
The future is full of difficulties and full of danger. We 
appear to be rushing on perils headlong and with our eyes 
all open." 

The Wilmot proviso did not become a law, but it formed 
another landmark in the movement towards the final crisis. 

The next important act in the drama was the compro- 
mises of 1850, which arose out of the admission of California 
into the Union. Was this land of gold to be a free State or 
a slave State, was the question. The discovery of gold 



THE POLITICAL REVOLUTION OF 1860. 7 

within her borders had made the territory famous through- 
out the world and had attracted thither a motley crowd 
of emigrants, "the seekers of El Dorado, Argonauts in 
search of the golden fleece." In the constitution that was 
adopted slavery was forever prohibited in the State. This, 
in a sense, was more important than the daily discoveries 
of new gold fields. When Congress met and the admis- 
sion of the State into the Union came up for consideration, 
the political excitement eclipsed the gold excitement. The 
preponderating sentiment in the North was that the State 
should remain free territory; while the sentiment in the 
South was equally strong against any congressional legis- 
lation that should interfere with their supposed right of 
taking their slaves into the new territory. As Mr. Rhodes 
tersely expresses it: "A population of thirteen millions 
demanded that the common possession should be dedicated 
to freedom; while a population of eight millions demanded 
the privilege of devoting it to slavery." 

When the question came up in the Senate, it called forth 
a most memorable debate, in which Webster, Clay and 
Calhoun were the chief actors. It was the last scene these 
giants were to play upon the political stage. Clay believed 
that the Union was in danger, and felt that he was the man 
beyond all others to save it. As a basis of compromise, 
he offered a series of resolutions providing for the admis- 
sion of California as a free State; that territorial govern- 
ment should be established without restriction as to slavery ; 
that it was inexpedient to abolish slavery in the District 
of Columbia; that more effective provision should be made 
for the rendition of fugitive slaves, etc. There was some- 
thing sadly pathetic in the way in which these heroic figures 
of former years pleaded in the sunset of life for the preser- 
vation of the Union. "Henry Clay was in his seventy-third 
year, and age and ill health served to remind him that the 



8 THE POLITICAL REVOLUTION OF 1860. 

sands of his earthly career were almost run." He called his 
theme "The Awful Subject." He desired to present the 
olive branch to both parties of the distracted and at the 
present moment unhappy country. On the general sub- 
ject, his leaning was more to the Northern than the South- 
ern side of the controversy; but on the subject of fugitive 
slaves, he took extreme Southern ground. Calhoun follov/ed 
Clay. It was his last formal speech. "Long battle with 
disease had wasted his frame, but, swathed in flannels, he 
crawled to the Senate Chamber to utter his last words of 
warning to the North, and to make his last appeal for what 
he considered justice to his own beloved South." His speech 
was read by Senator Mason. He admitted that universal 
discontent pervaded the South. Its "great and primary 
cause is that the equilibrium between the two sections has 
been destroyed;" the gradual yet steady assumption of 
greater powers by federal government at the expense of 
the rights of the States had proved an inestimable injury 
to the South. It is undeniable that the Union is in danger. 
How can it be saved? The North must give us equal right 
in the acquired territory; she must return our fugitive 
slaves; she must cease the agitation of the slave question, 
and she must consent to an amendment to the Constitu- 
tion which will restore to the South in substance the power 
she possessed of protecting herself before the equilibrium 
between the two sections was destroyed by the action of 
the government. The admission of California will be the 
test question. 

Webster followed in his celebrated 7th of March speech. 
He said: "I wish to speak to-day, not as a Massachusetts 
man, nor as a Northern man, but as an American. It is 
not to be denied that we live in the midst of strong agita- 
tions, and are surrounded by very considerable dangers to 
our institutions and government. The imprisoned winds 



THE POLITICAL REVOLUTION OF 1860. 9 

are let loose. The East, the North and the stormy South 
combine to throw the v^'hole sea into commotion, to toss 
its billows to the skies, and to disclose its profoundest 
depths. I speak to-day for the preservation of the Union. 
Hear me for my cause. At the time the Constitution was 
adopted, there v*'as no diversity of opinion between the 
North and the South upon the subject of slavery. It will 
be found that both parties of the country held it equally 
an evil, a moral and political evil. A difference of opinion 
showed itself, the North growing strong against slavery, the 
South in its support," etc. In reply to Calhoun, on the 
question of equilibrium, he said that the general lead in 
the politics of the country had been a Southern lead. He 
declared that from the formation of the Union to that hour, 
the South had monopolized three-fourths of the honors 
and emoluments under the Federal government. He said 
he would not put in the bill any Wilmot Proviso for the 
mere purpose of a taunt or reproach. "I will not do a 
thing unnecessarily that wounds the feelings of others, or 
that does discredit to my own understanding." On the 
question of fugitive slaves, he thought the complaints of 
the South were just, and the North had lacked in her duty. 
" Sir, he who sees these States now revolving in harmony 
around a common center, and expects them to quit their 
places and fly off without convulsion, may look the next 
hour to see the heavenly bodies rush from their spheres, 
and jostle against each other in the realms of space, without 
causing the wreck of the universe. Instead of speaking of 
the possibility or utility of secession, instead of dwelling 
in those caverns of darkness, instead of groping with those 
ideas so full of all that is horrid and horrible, let us come 
out into the light of day; let us enjoy the fresh air of liberty 
and union. Never did there devolve on any generation of 
men higher trusts than now devolve upon us for the preser- 



10 THE POLITICAL REVOLUTION OF 1860. 

vation of this Constitution, and the harmony and peace of 
all who are destined to live under it. Let us make our 
generation one of the strongest and brightest links in that 
golden chain which is destined, I fondly believe, to grapple 
the people of all the States to this Constitution for all 
ages to come." 

The speech, while it was admired for its eloquence, was 
a great disappointment to the people of the North. Web- 
ster was denounced as a traitor. Horace Mann said : " Web- 
ster is a fallen star; Lucifer descending from heaven." 
Theodore Parker said : " I know no deed in American history 
done by a son of New England to which I can compare this 
but the act of Benedict Arnold." Whittier, in song, 
mourned for the fallen statesman: 

So fallen! so lost! the light withdrawn 

Which once he wore! 
The glory from his gray hairs gone 

Forevermore ! 

O, dumb be passion's stormy rage, 

When he who might 
Have lighted up and led his age, 

Falls back in night. 

Of all we loved and honored, naught 

Save power remains — 
A fallen angel's pride of thought, 

Still strong in chains. 

All else is gone! from those great eyes 

The soul has fled: 
When faith is lost, when honor dies 

The man is dead! 

Emerson called him a man of the past, not a man of 
faith and hope. By many his speech was regarded as a 
bid for the presidency. In the light of subsequent history, 
public sentiment has changed in regard to Webster's posi- 



THE POLITICAL REVOLUTION OF 1860. 11 

tion. His dislike of slavery was strong, but his love for 
the Union was stronger, and he believed that the " crusade 
against slavery had arrived at a point where its further 
prosecution was hurtful to the Union." 

George F. Hoar, of Plymouth, August 1, 1889, said of 
him : " Webster's great argument was behind every bayonet 
and was carried home with every cannon shot in the war 
which saved the Union." 

Mr. Seward followed Webster. He said the public senti- 
ment of the North would not support the enforcement of 
the fugitive slave act. "Has any government ever suc- 
ceeded in changing the moral convictions of its subjects by 
force? We hold no arbitrary authority over anything. 
The Constitution regulates our stewardship; the Constitu- 
tion devotes the domain (the territories) to union, to justice, 
to defence, to welfare and to liberty. But there is a higher 
law than the Constitution, which regulates our authority 
over the domain and devotes it to the same noble purposes. 
The territory is a part, no inconsiderable part, of the com- 
mon heritage of mankind, bestowed upon them by the 
Creator of the universe. We are his stewards and must so 
discharge our trust as to secure in the highest attainable 
degree their happiness. I feel assured that slavery must 
give way, that emancipation is inevitable and is near. 
You cannot roll back the tide of social progress, you must 
be content with what you have. There will be no disunion 
and no secession." He closed with an appeal for the 
maintenance of the Union. 

We quote freely from these famous speeches (perhaps 
too freely for such a paper as this) in order to show that 
the issues that were tearing asunder the North and the 
South centered in slavery and the limitations of federal 
power. 

The compromise was passed finally and received the 
approval of the president. 



12 THE POLITICAL REVOLUTION OF 1860, 

The success of the compromise was largely due to the 
support of the Northern Democrats and the Southern 
Whigs; but there commenced to appear evidences of the 
breaking up of the old parties. 

"Preachers in their pulpits, in synods and in various 
meetings pronounced against the Fugitive Slave Act as 
being in conflict with the law of God. Negroes took alarm 
b}^ thousands and fled to Canada, the North assisting them 
in their flight." 

Charles Sumner, in the next Congress, presented a 
memorial from the Society of Friends, asking for the 
repeal of the Fugitive Slave Law. He made a memorable 
speech in presenting it, asserting that the literature of the 
land condemned slavery, and it was abhorred by the out- 
spoken, unequivocal head of the country at the time the 
Constitution was adopted. 

The Fugitive Slave Law was perhaps the most obnoxious 
part of the compromises, for as it came to be applied, it 
brought the people of the North face to face mth concrete 
cases of hardship, which excited their sympathies. Whit- 
tier offered up thanks for the Fugitive Slave Law, for it 
gave occasion for "Uncle Tom's Cabin," which Choate 
boasted would make two million abolitionists. 

When Mr. Pierce was elected president, he made an ap- 
peal for the Union, holding that the compromise measures 
of 1850 were strictly constitutional and should be unhesi- 
tatingly carried into effect; and the people as a whole were 
inclined to give him their support. But just as the dreams 
of the great compromises of 1850 seemed to be about to be 
realized, like a thunder clap from a blue sky, there was 
introduced in Congress a measure which set the entire coun- 
try aflame and ultimately led to political revolution. 

Stephen A. Douglas was the author of the measure 
which he introduced when the bill for the organization of 



THE POLITICAL REVOLUTION OF 1S60. 13 

the territory of Nebraska came before Congress, and which 
proposed to leave to the inhabitants of Nebraska the 
decision as to whether or not they should have slavery, 
thereby virtually repealing the provisions of the Missouri 
Compromise. It affirmed that the restrictions of the 
Missouri Compromise were superseded by the principles 
of the legislation of 1850, and were declared inoperative. 

"The Independent Democrats in Congress issued an ap- 
peal to the people of the United States, arraigning the bill 
as a gross violation of a sacred pledge, as a criminal be- 
trayal of precious rights. One journalist wTote that if the 
politicians of Washington have any doubt about the public 
opinion, let them put their ears to the ground, and "they 
will hear the roar of the tide coming in." 

When the measure came up for consideration, Mr. Doug- 
las made a somewhat violent and abusive, though able and 
ingenious speech in its favor. He contended that in the 
various preceding acts of compromise the principle estab- 
lished was: 

"Congressional non-intervention as to slavery; that the 
people of the territories were to be allowed to do as they 
pleased on the question, subject only to the provisions of 
the Constitution. We all know," he said, "that the ob- 
ject of the compromise measures of 1850 was to establish 
certain great principles Vv'hich would avoid the slavery 
agitation in all time to come. Was it our object simply to 
provide for a temporary evil? Was that the object for 
which the eminent and venerable senator from Kentucky 
(Clay) came here and sacrificed even his last energies upon 
the altar of his country? Was that the object for which 
Webster, Clay and Cass, and all the patriots of that day 
struggled so long and so strenuously? Was it merely the 
affliction of a temporary expedient in agreeing to stand by 
past and dead legislation that the Baltimore platform 



14 THE POLITICAL REVOLUTION OF 1860. 

pledged us to sustain the compromise of 1850? Was it the 
understanding of the Whig party when they adopted the 
compromise measures of 1850 as an article of political 
faith that they were only agreeing to that which was past, 
and had no reference to the future? By no means. In 
the legislation of 1850 a principle was adopted — the prin- 
ciple of Congressional non-interference with slavery. The 
legal efTect of this bill is neither to legislate slavery into 
these territories nor out of them, but to let the people do 
as they please. If they wish slavery, they have a right to 
it. If they do not want it, they will not have it, and you 
should not force it upon them." Thus Douglas proclaimed 
his famous doctrine of popular sovereignty. 

In reply to Douglas, Mr. Chase made a speech against the 
Kansas-Nebraska Bill and took a place in the foremost 
rank of anti-slavery statesmen. He appealed to the 
senators to reject the bill, as it was a violation of the plighted 
faith and solemn sompact which our fathers made, and 
which we, their sons, are bound by every sacred tie of obli- 
gation sacredly to maintain. Wade, Seward and Sumner 
made speeches against the bill. Sumner spoke to the 
cultivated people of Massachusetts. He said the country 
is directly summoned to consider face to face a cause which 
is connected with all that is divine in religion, with all that 
is pure and noble in morals, with all that is truly practical 
and constitutional in politics. To every man in the land 
it saj^s, with clear, penetrating voice, "Are you for free- 
dom or are 5''ou for slavery"? 

Edward Everett also made a speech against the bill in 
the Senate. "The storm that is rising," wrote Seward, 
"is such a one as this country has never yet seen." When 
the bill came before the Senate to be voted on, Douglas 
rose, a half hour before midnight, to close the debate. 
Always a splendid fighter, says Mr. Rhodes, he seemed 



THE POLITICAL REVOLUTION OF 1S60. 15 

this night Uke a gladiator who contended against great 
odds; for, while he was backed by thirty-seven senators, 
among his fourteen opponents were the ablest men of the 
Senate, and their arguments must be answered if he ex- 
pected to ride out the storm which had been raised against 
him. Never in the United States, in the arena of debate, 
had a bad cause been more splendidly advocated; never 
more effectively was the worst made to appear the better 
reason. We are contending, he said, for the great funda- 
mental principle of popular sovereignty, and as the Mis- 
souri restriction is inconsistent with that principle, it ought 
to be abrogated. The bill does equal and exact justice to 
the whole Union, and every part of it ; it violates the rights 
of no state or territory, but places each on a perfect equal- 
ity, and leaves the people thereof to the free enjoyment 
of all their rights under the Constitution. The "Little 
Giant," as he was called, spoke until daybreak and the 
crowd remained to hear his last words. The bill v/as passed 
by a vote of thirty-seven to fourteen. Douglas boasted of 
the triumph of his doctrine of popular sovereignty. 

Chase said: "They celebrate a present victory, but the 
echoes they awake will not rest until slavery itself shall 
die." 

Mr. Rhodes says the speech of Douglas was an epoch- 
making event in the decade of 1850-60. 

The bill finally passed the House of Representatives by 
a vote of 113 yeas to 100 nays, was approved by the presi- 
dent and became the law of the land. More than forty 
Democratic Representatives of the North voted against 
the repeal. 

The passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, followed by 
the Dred Scott decision, a few years later, forms the high- 
water mark of the aggressions of slavery. It let loose the 
furies of agitation throughout the land, and stirred up, in 



]6 THE POLITICAL REVOLUTION OF 1860. 

the worst forms of bitterness, strife, anger, heart-burning 
and hatred. In the judgment of the North, it was a great 
conspiracy against human freedom. In the South, it was 
viewed as an honest effort to recover rights of which they 
had been unjustly deprived. No previous excitement 
bore any comparison with that which spread over the 
North after the bill became a law. It produced, says 
Mr. Blaine, almost a frenzy of wrath on the part of thou- 
sands and tens of thousands in both the old parties who 
had never before taken part in anti-slavery agitation. The 
New York Independent teemed with articles, and Henry 
Ward Beecher thundered with eloquence against the act. 
Lincoln, in his autobiograph}^, says : " I was losing interest 
in politics when the repeal of the Missouri Compromise 
aroused me again." Greeley said Pierce and Douglas had 
made more abolitionists in three months than Garrison 
and Phillips could have made in half a century. Emerson 
said: "The Fugitive Slave Law did much to unglue the 
eyes of men, and now the Nebraska bill leaves us staring." 

The Kansas-Nebraska Act was perhaps the most mo- 
mentous that passed Congress prior to the outbreak of the 
Civil War. It sealed the doom of the Whig party. It 
made the Furtive Slave Law a dead letter in the North; 
it alienated the Germans from, and led to the downfall of, 
the Democratic party; and it caused the formation of the 
Republican party. The measure was uncalled for and 
can only be accounted for by the overpowering ambition 
of its author. 

While the Act was under consideration, a meeting was 
held at Ripon, Wisconsin, which recommended the organi- 
zation of a new party, under the name Republican. Later, 
on July 6, 1854, another meeting was held at Jackson, 
Michigan, which declared slavery to be a great moral, 
social and political evil, and demanded the repeal of the 



THE POLITICAL REVOLUTION OF 1860. 17 

Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Fugitive Slave Law, and 
the aboHtion of slavery in the District of Columbia; and a 
ticket was nominated. 

Shortly after the passage of the Act, thirty members of 
the House of Congress met and decided that it was neces- 
sary to form a new party, under the name of Republican. 
Greeley, Wade, Sumner and other influential men fell in 
with the movement. 

The first Republican National Convention met in Phila- 
delphia, June 17, 1856, and in its ranks were all shades of 
anti-slavery opinions, the aboHtionists, the Free Soilers, the 
Democrats who had supported the Wilmot Proviso, and the 
Whigs who had followed Sevv'ard. 

Thaddeus Stevens advocated the nomination of Judge 
McLean of the Supreme Court as a candidate for the presi- 
dency, and made an address in regard to which Mr. Wash- 
bourne said : "I never heard a man speak v/ith more feeling 
or in more persuasive accent." Mr. Rhodes says that one 
great objection to McLean was that he was on the Supreme 
Court bench, and a feeling prevailed that judges of the 
higher courts lowered themselves and their courts when 
they entered into a contest for the presidency. Mr. Blaine 
says, however, that Judge McLean was old and the Re- 
publican party was young. He belonged to the past, the 
party was looking to the future. It demanded a more er.er- 
getic and attractive candidate, and John C. Fremont was 
chosen on the first ballot. The convention declared that 
slavery should by positive law be excluded from the terri- 
tories. 

On the second day of June, 1856, the Democratic National 
Convention met at Cincinnati and nominated James Buch- 
anan for president, and adopted a platform resolving that 
" The American Democracy recognize and adopt the princi- 
ples contained in the organic laws establishing the terri- 



18 THE POLITICAL REVOLUTION OF 1860. 

tories of Nebraska and Kansas as embodying the only 
sound and safe solution of the slavery question." The 
issue Yvas clearly defined. 

" Never in our history, and probably never in the history 
of the world, had a more pure, more disinterested and more 
intelligent body of men banded together for a noble political 
object than those who now enrolled themselves under the 
Republican banner. The clergymen, the professors in the 
colleges, the men devoted to literature and science, and 
teachers, were for the most part Republicans. Silliman, of 
Yale, Felton, of Harvard, Emerson, Longfellow, Bryant, 
George William Curtis, N. P. Willis and Washington Irving 
strenuously advocated the Republican cause." The New 
York Independent said: "Vote as you pray, pray as you 
vote." 

Longfellov/ wrote to Sumner that one reason why he did 
not want to go to Europe was on account of losing his vote 
in the autumn. The contest in Pennsylvania was very 
warm. It is said $150,000 was sent into the State for the 
slave-holding States. August Belmont contributed $50,- 
000 and Wall Street put into Forney's hands $100,000 more 
for the campaign. Mr. Dana wrote before the election: 
"The election in Pennsylvania will go by from 30,000 to 
40,000 majority against Buchanan. The tide is rising with 
a rush, as it does in the Bay of Fundy; and you will hear 
an awful squealing among hogs and jackasses when they 
come to ch"own." Buchanan's majority in Pennsylvania 
was less than 3,000, out of 423,000 votes. 

The Republicans were defeated, but their magnificent 
contest made them feel as though they had won the battle. 
The Democrats were surprised by the large popular vote 
against them. Mr. Blaine, speaking of the result, said: 
"The distinct and avowed marshalling of a solid North 
against a sohd South had begun and the result of the 



THE POLITICAL REVOLUTION OF 1860. 19 

presidential election of 1856 settled nothing except that a 
mightier struggle was in the future;" while Whittier sang: 

"If months have well-nigh won the field, 
What may not four years do!" 

Soon after President Buchanan's inauguration, the 
Supreme Court delivered its famous decision in the Dred 
Scott case, in which it declared that the act of Congress pro- 
hibiting slavery in the territories north of 36°30' was un- 
constitutional and void. The repeal of the Missouri Com- 
promise was approved by the highest judicial tribunal. 
Not only was the appeal approved, its re-enactment was 
forbidden. The decision only rendered the contest more 
intense and bitter. It was received throughout the North 
with scorn and indignation. It entered at once into the 
political discussions of the people and remained there until 
it was remanded to the arbitrament of war. Mr. Sumner 
said that Taney would be hooted down the pages of history, 
and that an emancipated country would fix upon his name 
the stigma it deserved. Mr. Wilson denounced the decision 
as "the greatest crime in the judicial annals of the Re- 
public, and declared it to be the abhorrence, the scoff, the 
jeer of the patriotic hearts of America." 

It was at this juncture in the genetic development of the 
forces that wrought the revolution of '60, that there emerged 
from the body of the people a man of prophetic vision, 
of homely phrase but heroic mould, upon whose broad 
shoulders the burdens of the nation were destined to be 
cast in the most acute crisis of its history, who defined the 
issue in language that was almost scriptural in truth 
and simplicity. 

In opening the senatorial contest in Illinois, he said: 
"I believe this government cannot endure permanently 
half slave, half free. I do not expect the house to fall, but 



20 THE- POLITICAL REVOLUTION OF 1860 

I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all 
one thing or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery 
will arrest the farther spread of it, and place it where the 
public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course 
of absolute extinction, or its advocates will push it forward 
till it shall become alike lav/ful in all the States, old as well 
as new, North as well as South." Born and bred in the 
wilderness, a rough child of nature, untutored in the schools, 
this strangely marked man of destiny, against the advice 
of his intimate friends, thus boldly and plainly proclaimed 
the handwriting of fate as no other had as yet done. Pos- 
sessed of a keen moral sense, loving truth for the truth's 
sake, he exposed the fallacy of his opponent's position 
that it v/as a matter of indifference whether slavery vras 
voted up or dovm; and by propounding a series of ques- 
tions to him, forced him to shov/ his hand in a v.'ay that 
meant choosing between the North and the South. Mr. 
Douglas won the contest by a majority of eight in the 
Legislature, while his opponent received a plurality of 
4,000 in the popular vote. He won the victory in the 
State, but it proved his destruction in the wider field of 
national politics. It was the beginning of the end of 
Democratic harmony. Even at the risk of destroying the 
Democratic party, the Southern leaders resolved to punish 
Douglas for betraying their cause. With this end in view, 
accordingly, in session following the debate the Democratic 
senators laid down a series of resolutions, declaring that 
neither Congress nor a territorial Legislature possessed the 
power to impair the right of any citizen of the United 
States to take his slave property into the common terri- 
tories and there hold and enjoy the same, and if the terri- 
torial government should fail to provide adequate protec- 
tion to the rights of the slave holder, it would be the duty 
of Congress to supply such deficiency. To this extreme 



THE POLITICAL REVOLUTION OF 1860. 21 

position the Northern Democrats could not subscribe. 
They felt that if they wished to remain in the ranks of the 
Democracy they would be compelled to trample on the 
principles and surrender the prejudices of a lifetime. "The 
situation was a cause of deep regret to the Northern Demo- 
crats, by whom the traditions of Jefferson and Madison and 
Jackson were devoutedly treasured. That a party whose 
history was inwoven with the glory of the Republic should 
now come to its end in a quarrel over the status of the 
negro, in a region where his labor was not wanted, was, 
to many of its members, as incomprehensible as it was 
sorrowful and exasperating. They protested, but could 
not prevent. Anger was aroused and men refused to listen 
to reason. They were borne along ; they knew not whither 
or by what force. Time might have restored the party to 
harmony, but at the very height of the factional contest, 
the representatives of both sections were hurried forward 
to the National Convention of 1860, with principles sub- 
ordinated to passion, with judgment displaced by a desire 
for revenge." The storm clouds commenced to thicken 
and serious men everywhere began to realize the gravity 
of the situation. 

The National Convention of the Democratic party met 
at Charleston, in April, 1860. The Southern members 
demanded an explicit assertion of the right of citizens to 
settle in the territories with their slaves, and of the duty 
of the Federal government to protect slavery in the terri- 
tories, and wherever else its constitutional authority ex- 
tended. To this extreme position the Northern Democrats 
were vigorously opposed. There was a split in the con- 
vention and seven Southern States withdrew and organized 
a separate assemblage. Unable to come to an agreement, 
the convention adjourned, to meet in Baltimore on the 18th 
of June. When this convention reassembled, it divided and 



22 THE POLITICAL REVOLUTION OF 1860. 

the Southern delegation nominated John C. Breckenridge 
for president, while the Northern convention nominated 
Stephen A. Douglas. 

On the 9th of May, 1S60, a party, calling themselves the 
Constitutional Union Party, met at Baltimore and nomi- 
nated John Bell, of Tennessee, for president and Edward 
Everett, of Massachusetts, for vice-president. The plat- 
form was "The Constitution of the Country and the Union 
of the States, and the Enforcement of the Laws." 

After the Charleston Convention, Jefferson Davis said 
in the Senate: "We claim protection for slavery, first, 
because it is right; second, because it is the duty of the 
general government. What right has Congress to abdi- 
cate any power conferred upon it as trustees of the States? 
But we make you no threats, we only give you a warning." 

In conversation shortly after adjournment, Alexander 
Stephens said: "Men will be cutting one another's throats 
in a little while. In less than twelve months we shall be in 
a war, and that the bloodiest in history. Men seem to be 
utterly blinded to the future. What is to become of us 
then? God only knows. The Union will certainly be 
disrupted." 

On May 16, 1860, the Republicans met in National Con- 
vention in Chicago. It was a representative meeting of 
the active and able men of both the old parties in the North 
who came together on the one absorbing issue of the hour. 
They thought alike on the one subject of putting a stop to 
the extension of slavery. George Ashman, of Massachu- 
setts, was elected permanent chairman. Thaddeus Stevens 
and Andrew H. Reeder were delegates from Pennsylvania. 
Mr. Seward, of New York, was placed in nomination by his 
life-long friend, Mr. Thurlow Weed. His cause was advo- 
cated by the eloquent tongue of William M. Evarts. He 
pleaded for the Republic, for the party that would save it, 



THE POLITICAL REVOLUTION OF 1860. 23 

for the great statesmen who had founded the party and 
knew where and how to lead it. " It is said that the great 
career of Mr. Seward was never so illumined as by the 
brilliant painting of Mr. Evarts." 

Mr. Greeley, Andrew G. Curtin and Alexander K. Mc- 
Clure were among those who opposed the nomination of 
Mr. Seward. 

The delegates from Illinois presented the name of Abra- 
ham Lincoln. Lincoln himself was present and John 
Hanks marched in among the crowd in the Wigwam, bear- 
ing on his shoulders the two historic rails on which was 
inscribed: "From a lot made by Abraham Lincoln and 
John Hanks in the Sagamon bottom in the year 1830." 

On the first ballot, Mr. Seward received 173^ votes, Mr. 
Lincoln, 102; Mr. Cameron, 50^; Mr. Chase, 49; Mr. Bates, 
48; scattering, 42. On the second ballot, Mr. Seward re- 
ceived 184^; Mr. Lincoln, 181; and the rest 99^. On the 
third ballot, Mr. Seward had 180, while Mr. Lincoln had 
23L2"- As soon as Mr. Evarts could obtain the floor, he 
moved to make the nomination unanimous, which was 
promptly and enthusiasticalh^ done. The nomination was 
followed by great rejoicing throughout the North and 
West. 

The platform denounced the dogma that the Constitu- 
tion carried slavery into the territories, declared the demo- 
cratic doctrine and popular sovereignty a deception and a 
fraud, branded the recent re-opening of the African slave 
trade as a crime against humanity and a burning shame 
to our country and age. 

"In the four presidential tickets in the field, every shade 
of political opinion was represented. Mr. Lincoln was in 
favor of prohibiting the extension of slavery by law; Mr. 
Breckenridge was in favor of protecting its extension by 
law; Mr. Douglas desired to evade it and advocated the 



24 THE POLITICAL REVOLUTION OF 1860. 

doctrine of non-intervention, and Mr. Bell desired to lead 
the people away from every issue except the abstract one 
of preserving the Union." 

The canvass was most strenuous. The torch-bearers of 
literature, Holmes, Whittier, Bryant, Curtis and Lowell 
ardently espoused the cause of Mr. Lincoln. Mr. Lowell 
said: "We believe this election is a turning point in our 
history. We have only two parties in the field — those who 
favor the extension of slavery and those who oppose it. It 
is in a moral aversion of slavery as a great \\Tong that the 
chief strength of the Republican party lies." Henry Ward 
Beecher and Dr. Chapin delivered political speeches from 
their pulpits on Sunday evening before the election. 

Mr. Lincoln gained steadily as the campaign progressed, 
and on the popular vote received 1,857,610, being 930,170 
votes less than all his opponents combined. There was 
great joy throughout the North over the victory. Mr. 
Longfellow vsTote in his diary: "Lincoln is elected; over- 
whelming majorities in New York and Pennsylvania. This 
is a great victory. It is the redemption of the country. 
Freedom is triumphant." 

Mr. Motley said: "I rejoice at last in the triumph of 
freedom over slavery more than I can express. Thank 
God it can no longer be said that the common law of my 
country is slavery, and that the American flag carries 
slavery with it wherever it goes." 

Thus was achieved the political revolution of 1860. The 
Republican party won a notable victory in the battle of 
the ballots, and the Democratic party, which had dominated 
the country for half a century, suffered a most signal defeat. 
The long political struggle, reaching far back, almost to 
the beginnings of the government, was over; and for the 
first time in the history of the country, the South was de- 
feated in a presidential election where an issue alTecting the 
slavery question was involved. 



THE POLITICAL REVOLUTION OF 1860. 25 

As we have endeavored to shov/, the revolution was the 
culmination of a struggle v/hich was inherent in the Con- 
stitution of the government. Every time the clash came 
it seemed to grow more violent ; and although it was settled 
from time to time by conciliation and compromise, it was 
evident that the issues which were becoming more and 
more clearly defined, would eventually have to be squarely 
met and decided. 

The conflict was dimly foreshadowed as early as when 
the Constitution itself was framed and adopted. It appeared 
in the discussions over the Louisiana question of 1812, in 
the admission of Missouri and the annexation of Texas. 
In the compromises of 1850 it threatened the destruction 
of the Union; and in the repeal of the Missouri Compro- 
mise and the Kansas struggles and in the Dred Scott de- 
cision it was precipitated to final settlement. It was these 
events, as Mr. Blaine well says, " that led often slowly, but 
always with directness, to the political revolution of 1860." 

The contest was irrepressible and inevitable. It is some- 
times maintained that if it had not been for the repeal of 
the Missouri Compromise the conflict might have been 
avoided; and that those vrho precipitated that measure 
must be held responsible for the dire consequences that 
followed. This is only partially true. The men who 
forced that measure through no doubt hastened the con- 
flict, for it led the North to lose all faith in compromises 
and to become fixed in the conviction that the house divided 
against itself could not stand and that the Republic half 
slave, half free, could not endure. But the event was only 
an incident in the movement, it was not the ultimate cause. 
Two irreconcilable forces were at work in the life of the 
people, and the political events which brought the agita- 
tion to the surface only indicated the hidden volcanic 
fires underneath. Mr. Seward correctly defined the situa- 



26 THE POLITICAL REVOLUTION OF 1860. 

tion v/hen he said, in his speech at Rochester, October 25, 
1858: "It is an irrepressible conflict between opposing and 
enduring forces and it means that the United States must 
and will, sooner or later, become either a slave-holding 
nation or entirely a free-labor nation." 

Although industrial, sociological and religious problems 
were involved in it, the immediate occasion of the conflict, 
no doubt, was slavery. As Mr. Rhodes put it: " Two causes 
operated in the formation of the Republican party — the 
cause of the slave and the political power of the slave 
oligachy." On this question, men on both sides no doubt 
were at fault. It must be admitted that there was much 
that was reprehensible in the extreme radicalism of the 
North; but the brunt of responsibility for the disasters 
that followed the conflict must be borne by the South, on 
account of its unwarranted aggressions on the slavery 
question. The North was aggressive in the way of agita- 
tion and resistance, but it never passed an act interfering 
with the right of the South to their property in slaves. 
Mr. Buchanan admits this when he says, in his fourth 
annual message, December 3, 1860: "It is a remarkable 
fact in our history that, notwithstanding the repeated 
efforts of the anti-slavery party, no single act has every 
passed Congress, unless we may possibly except the Mis- 
souri Compromise, impairing in the slightest degree the right 
of the South to their property in slaves," etc. 

But beneath the slavery and industrial question, and as 
a part of the cause of the conflict, especially as the issues 
became crystallized in the Civil War, was the broader ques- 
tion of States' Rights and Federal Authority. With the 
election of Abraham Lincoln began the era of strong gov- 
ernment, of Federal authority as over against State sov- 
ereignty. This question was involved in the slavery ques- 
tion from the beginning and went hand in hand with it. It 



THE POLITICAL REVOLUTION OF 1860. 27 

was discussed in the speeches of Davis and Calhoun and 
Clay and Seward and Sumner and Webster, who made it 
the climax of his celebrated speech agamst Hayne.^^ _ 

Mr Buchanan, in his inaugural address, said: 1 clesiie 
to state at the commencement of my administration that 
long experience and observation have convinced me that 
a strict construction of the powers of the government is 
the only true, as well as the only safe, theory of the Con- 
stitution. The Federal Constitution is a grant from the 
States to Congress of certain specific powers," etc. 

Mr. Lincoln, after his election, said: "Having never 
been States, either in substance or in name, outside ot the 
Union, whence this magical omnipotence of states rights. 
Much is said about the sovereignty of the States but the 
word even is not in the National Constitution. The btates 
have their status in the Union, and they have no other legal 
status. This relative matter of national power and states 
right, as a principle, is no other than the principle of gen- 
erality and locality," etc. ^ . x. i i +u , 

The rio-ht of a State to secede and to resist Federal authoi- 
ity had been an open question and was stoutly maintained 
by eminent men in the North as well as by the leading 
men in the South. When Abraham Lincoln assumed the 
reins of government, while he arrayed himself against 
slaverv as a great moral and political wrong, he set his face 
sternly against secession and disunion, and proclaimed that 
the Union must and should be preserved. He was opposed 
to slavery, but he was more opposed to secession, ihe 
preservation of the Union to him was the paramount con- 
cern. The slavery question fired the minds of the people 
often to white heat in the political contest of 1860; but the 
moment Sumter was fired on, the main cry that went up 
from the North was for the preservation of the Umon. 
" Down with rebellion! " " Down with secession! were m 



28 THE POLITICAL REVOLUTION OF I860. 

the clarion call to arms. Many patriotic men in the North, 
who had little sympathy with the anti-slavery agitation, 
shouldered their muskets and went forth to fight for the 
Union. They would have scorned to have been told that 
they were fighting for the cause of the negro. Mr. Sumner 
and Mr. Schurz and many of Mr. Lincoln's friends and 
advisers were constantly urging him to come forth posi- 
tively with a message proclaiming to the world that the 
cause of the war was slavery, and that the government was 
waging a war for the freedom of the slaves. 

Mr. Schurz was particularly insistent upon Mr. Lincoln 
doing this, as he states in his recent "Reminiscences," 
believing that such an announcement would enlist Eng- 
land and the nations of Europe in the cause of the North; 
but Mr. Lincoln persistently refused to take such a step, 
believing that the cause of the Union was deeper than the 
cause of slavery, and knowing that such action on his part 
would create dissension among patriotic men of the North. 
Herein Mr. Lincoln showed deeper foresight and greater 
political wisdom than the coterie of great men who sur- 
rounded him. He was maligned and slandered and tra- 
duced and sneered at by scholars and statesmen who 
believed themselves to be his superiors; but he towered 
above them all and stands justified before the bar of history 
for the position he took. He believed in strong govern- 
ment and, in his determination to save the Union and to 
crush rebellion, he assumed povv^ers on the part of the 
Federal government as over against the States that had 
never before been exercised. He was berated in this regard 
as much as President Roosevelt is to-day. Vallandingham 
called him ^'The Csesar of the American Republic." Wen- 
dell Phillips said of him that he was "A more unlimited 
despot than the world knows this side of China;" and 
Senator Grimes spoke of going to see the president as an 



THE POLITICAL REVOLUTION OF 1860. 29 

" attempt to approach the footstool of the power enthroned 
at the other end of the avenue." 

The seeds of the new Democracy, as it now exists under 
the masterful sway of President Roosevelt, were sown in 
the Revolution of 1860. It was a fortunate circumstance 
that this issue was in a sense veiled under cover of the 
slavery question, which appealed to the emotions and moral 
sense; for, stripped of the moral issue, it is a question 
whether the plea for the perpetual Union of the States 
would have triumphed. 

The moral side of the question appealed especially to the 
people of the nation and enlisted the best talent in every 
sphere of life in its behalf. It touched poetry and song 
and art and literature, as well as politics. But whether 
we regard the high moral or the deep political principle 
involved, no more brilliant galaxy of statesmen, orators, 
poets, preachers, editors, professors and thinkers of all 
classes were ever enlisted in any political cause. They Vv-ere 
high-minded, conscientious men, ready to yield up their 
lives in the cause they espoused. Their patriotic zeal can 
never be forgotten. 

"Till the mountains are worn out and the rivers forget 
to flow, till the clouds are weary of replenishing springs, 
and the springs forget to gush, and the rills to sing, shall 
their names be kept fresh with reverent honors which are 
inscribed upon the book of national remembrance." — 
Beecher. 

The struggle was a costly one, in blood and treasure, but 
the results achieved were worth all it cost. The virtue and 
the purity as well as the permanency of the Union hung 
in the balance. It seems to be the way of the world that 
birth always involves death in some form or other ; as Whit- 
tier says: 

"Before the joy of peace must come 
The pains of purifying." 



30 THE POLITICAL REVOLUTION OF 1S60 

And it was necessary that the old order should die in order 
that the new one might live. The nation, as over against 
the Confederacy, was in its birth throes. The nation has 
had two births; first, its birth to Union, under Washington 
and Hamilton; second, its birth to liberty and national 
unity under Lincoln. It was a great thing to purge the 
nation of slavery; but it was a greater thing to weld the 
States into a nation and to make us one people. The 
Revolution of 1860 accomplished both: It abolished slavery; 
but it at the same time crushed forever the doctrine of the 
right of secession, expanded the idea of National Sovereignty, 
and inscribed upon the national ensign, in characters that 
can never be effaced, that sentiment, clear to every true 
American heart: 

"Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and 
Inseparable." 



Buchanan's Administration 



ON THE 



Eve of the Rebellion 

A Paper Read 

before 

The Cliosophic Society 

Lancaster, Pa., January 24, 1 908 

by 

W. U. Hensel 



It is Easy to be Wise After the Event. 



LANCASTER. PA. 

MCMVIII 



Buchanan's Adminstration on the 
Eve of the Rebellion. 



Mr. Chairman, Members of the Cliosophic Society and 
Guests : 

We have so far progressed with the development and dis- 
cussion of the topic for the present CHo season as to easily 
recognize and fully appreciate its comprehensive character. 
A half century of history, during a period so pregnant with 
great events, testing the very unity of our nation and the 
endurance of its institutions, under changes of the most 
revolutionary character, has been made the subject of 
many thousands of volumes of historical narration and 
philosophic discussion. In contemplating even the outside 
of them, one is at some loss to determine whether the tele- 
scopic or the microscopic system of investigation is the 
more satisfactory treatment for the purposes of this So- 
ciety's entertainment— not to say its instruction— whether 
the spectacular contemplation of the panorama or the 
perhaps more tedious study of the miniature is nearer to 
your tastes and more conformable to your temper. 

Howbeit no considerable figure in the period of political 
stress and storm which marked the agitation of the slavery 
issue and collateral questions can be fairly treated, as to 
the events of his life, the relation to his times and contem- 
poraries, his place in the final judgment of history and in 
the last analysis of patriotic character and motive, within 
the limits of a sixty-minute paper. 

For myself, I incline, from the observation and experience 
of many years, to the opinion that the range of our studies 
should be narrowed and focussed, and the subject of a single 



4 Buchanan's administration 

winter could be better comprehended and more satisfac- 
torily handled within a short space of time; that they 
should center in the life and influence of some single con- 
spicuous historical personage, the works, if not the work of 
a great creative genius, or revolve about one epoch in the 
life of our own or the history of some other nation. 

For many reasons I shall confine my treatment of Mr. 
Buchanan's public career and his attitude toward public 
questions to that closing period of his administration and 
of his official life which intervened the election and inaugu- 
ration of his successor; only contrasting his executive aims 
and acts with those of Mr. Lincoln at the outset of the 
latter's term, when the conditions were most nearly cor- 
responding. 

I shall assume that the main events of his life are familiar 
to any Lancaster audience— his pre-eminent ability as a 
lawyer, his long experience and signal services in the many 
places of public trust he held; his unsullied private char- 
acter and unquestioned personal integrity; his almost con- 
tinuous discharge of high official duties through the many 
years in which he rose from the rank of State legislator, 
through service as representative, diplomat, senator, secre- 
tary of state and ambassador, to the highest office under 
our government— advancing to the place by those grada- 
tions of experience, once familiar and common, but known 
no longer in our political system; since now— for better or 
for worse— canned statesmanship, like condensed food and 
preserved music, are furnished to order, on short notice 
and ready for immediate use— accepted generally for the 
gaudiness of the label rather than on the merits of the 
contents. 

Herbert Spencer, in "Man versus The State," observes 
that "unquestionably among monstrous beliefs one of the 
most monstrous is that while for a simple handicraft such 



ON THE EVE OF THE REBELLION 5 

as shoemaking a long apprenticeship is needful, the sole 
thing which needs no apprenticeship is making a nation's 
laws." Mr. Buchanan was not made president by reason 
of any such popular or party delusion. In reaching that 
place he only came to his own. 

Moreover, had he realized his sincere belief that the 
notable decision of the Supreme Court upon the slavery 
question, which was almost contemporaneous with his 
inauguration, would have been accepted by people and 
politicians as the decisive judgment of the supreme federal 
tribunal, upon the question of then greatest federal and 
popular concern, it may easily be conceived his administra- 
tion and himself would have gone down to history as iden- 
tified with one of the most notable executive terms since 
the beginning of the government. Mr. Bryce, the most 
far-sighted and fair-minded foreign critic of our institutions, 
and Mr. Rhodes, probably the most accurate historian of 
the period he treats, agree that our material progress during 
1850-60 was greater than that of any preceding decade; 
and the American gives' many illustrations of the tremen- 
dous advances in the intellectual, social and moral state of 
the people of that time. 

Again, had success attended the earnest efforts of those 
who so strenuously sought to avert war in 1861; had the 
vigorously pressed Crittenden measures of compromise 
been adopted and accepted ; or had Virginia's effort to save 
the Union — accepted by twenty-one states who composed 
the Peace Congress, presided over by one who had been 
President of the Republic — had this or any like movement 
prevailed, the Buchanan administration would have been 
signalized as marking at once the most awful crisis and the 
safest deliverance in all our internal historj^* and the sunset 
of his political life would have been irradiated with the 
"gold and glory of a perfect day." 



6 BUCHANAN S ADMINISTRATION 

THE VERDICT OF HISTORY. 

As it happened, I only record what is the overwhelming 
and apparently fixed conclusion of by far the greater num- 
ber of the historic writers of this period, that his adminis- 
tration was inglorious and feeble, that it failed where it 
ought to have succeeded, and that this was largely due to 
the weakness of the executive head, if not to his actual 
lack of patriotism. 

I believe it is the sincere belief of a great majority of 
even the intelligent people of this country who have hon- 
estly tried to study its history, that Mr. Buchanan, as 
president, at the outbreak of the secession movement, 
was a weak, timid, old man; who had gained his place by 
the favor of, if not through the bargain with, an arrogant, 
unscrupulous, slaveholding oligarchy of the South; that he 
was an accessory after, if not before, the fact, to the plot 
of a partisan majority of the Supreme Court to withhold 
the Dred Scott decision until after his election and then 
make it cover a point not vital to it, for unscrupulous 
political purposes; that he was the tool of crafty Southern 
leaders, who used him and his cabinet to bring to successful 
issue long predetermined plans to break up the Union; 
that in the development of these, he permitted, if he did 
not connive at, the weakening, scattering and disintegrat- 
ing of the armed forces of federal power on land and sea, 
the distribution throughout the Southern States of great 
and disproportionate quantities of muskets, rifles and 
cannon, so that the impending Confederacy might have a 
long start on the Union forces in physical preparation for 
armed conflict; that he obstructed Congress in its efforts 
to avert rebellion and war, or to properly, promptly and 
eiTectively meet it when declared ; that he drooped the col- 
ors of presidential dignity when he treated the envoys of 



ON THE EVE OF THE REBELLION 7 

defiant rebellion with a consideration due only to foreign 
ambassadors; that he parleyed over the re-inforcement of 
federal forces in government forts until the Confederates 
could rally enough troops to capture them; that he repu- 
diated the right to assert some existing constitutional ex- 
ecutive power to levy war against a rebellious state govern- 
ment or the people of a rebellious commonvv'ealth ; and that 
when he quit the office, March 4, 1861, he was succeeded by 
a firm, resolute, patriotic successor, whose policies, methods 
and executive acts, in striking contrast with, and immediate 
reversal of, Mr. Buchanan's, asserted the proper presidential 
prerogative, antagonized rebels, roused patriotism, re- 
inforced forts, inspired Congress, raised armies, established 
national credit, waged war; and, with a combination of 
Jefferson's statesmanship, Jackson's courage, Washington's 
patriotism, Hamilton's skill and Webster's enthusiasm, 
after four years of civil war, the expenditure of ten billions 
of treasure and the loss of a half million human lives, ac- 
complished what Mr. Buchanan could have done bloodlessly 
and economically had he not been a dotard or a traitor! 

I cannot reasonably quarrel with the young student who, 
off-hand, accepts these conclusions; nor with a younger 
generation, who find it more convenient — even though 
more unjust — to adopt than to dispute or dislodge them. 

Although nowadays we pay only one or two cents for a 
morning or evening newspaper, we are unreasonable enough 
to expect that what is printed therein, so far as it purports 
to be news and a narration of facts, has been gathered at 
the expense of its readers and patrons, with some regard 
for truth and accuracy. None of us has the time or the 
money to verify the same. Nevertheless, as we so often 
find that what is published regarding the things of which 
we have some knowledge is grossly inaccurate, unreliable 
and untruthful, we would also find, had we the means to 



8 Buchanan's administration 

test it, a vast deal of what passes for " a brief abstract and 
chronicle of the time" to be merely the "baseless fabric 
of a vision." So if the touchstone of historical truth be 
applied to much that the history makers have set down 
as established fact or invincible opinion, it will be found 
to be unsupported by testimony and unsustainable by fair 
argument. 

MR. BUCHANAN'S CRITICS. 

Thus in the elaborate and voluminous Albert Bushnell 
Hart series, "The American Nation," Prof. Smith, in the 
volume on "Parties and Slavery," dismisses Buchanan with 
the curt criticism: "No president has a record of more 
hopeless ill success." Chadwick, in his "Causes of the Civil 
War," in the same series, speaks of him as a weak "old 
man," surrounded by traitorous counsellors and afraid to 
do the duty which was plain before him. 

Schouler, in his five-volume history of the United States 
of America, "Under the Constitution," vrhich period he 
seems to think begins with the Revolution and ends with 
the Civil War, complains that in 1860-1 the country lacked 
an executive who made "a bold and manly stand," "a free 
avowal that the Union must be preserved and the laws of 
the land obeyed." This he blithely declares "would have 
relieved the gloom and despondency which was already 
gathering in business circles," etc.; and he dismisses the 
subject by re-echoing what he calls "the spontaneous cry 
of conscience Democrats": "Oh! for an hour of Jackson." 
In the language of the street, however, he "gives himself 
away" by confessing that the weak point in our system is 
that which kept the government's resources sequestered for 
four months "after the people had declared their will, in 
control of an administration and Congress defeated at the 
polls." As a historian, he makes nothing by trying to 



ON THE EVE OF THE REBELLION 9 

shift the blame for the forwardness of the Confederate 
cause from Buchanan to Congress; for he should have known, 
if he is a true historian, that the Congress which met one 
month after Lincoln's election was a Republican Congress, 
organized and controlled by the political opposition to 
Mr. Buchanan, and from December 3, 1860, when it met, 
until March 4, 1861, when it expired, it never passed an act 
nor did a deed in support of Buchanan's efforts to avert 
war or to suppress the incipient rebellion. And though the 
next Congress, elected in 1860, and overwhelmingly Re- 
publican, could have been called into extra session March 
5, 1861, no effort was made by the incoming Republican 
administration to assemble it until July 4, 1861 — nearly 
three months after the flag had been fired upon. 

Mr. Rhodes, who makes a resolute and in the main as 
successful an effort to be fair as anyone with his strong 
bias can be, clings to the view that Buchanan was "lame 
and apologetic" and by his executive headship so far domi- 
nated Dix, Black, Stanton and Holt, of his Cabinet, as to 
prevent a policy of "vigorous defense prompted by strong 
patriotic and national sentiments." John A. Logan, who 
of course is entitled to no rank as a historian or political 
philosopher, but whose opinion is significant because (Saul- 
of-Tarsus-like) he was converted over night from a pro- 
slavery Democrat to a red-mouthed Republican, and was 
seriously considered — by himself at least — as a presidential 
possibility, speaks of the Buchanan outfit, in his "Great 
Conspiracy," as "an imbecile administration, which stood 
with dejected mien and folded hands helplessly awaiting 
the coming catastrophe." Gen. Benj. F. Butler, who had 
voted fifty-seven times for Jefferson Davis as the fit Demo- 
cratic nominee for president of the United States, has re- 
called in "his book" how the question of secession could 
have been settled and "life and treasure incalculable" saved 



10 Buchanan's administration 

had Buchanan accepted his advice and arrested the Seces- 
sion Commissioners for treason. As Mr. Buchanan's suc- 
cessor had the benefit of Gen, Butler's services, , civil and 
military, and as all political parties had his help at one 
time, and his opposition at another, it probably may not 
be quite fair to quote him as authority on any side of any 
question. 

Mr. Blaine, v.'ho possesses some of the consistent qualities 
of a genuine historical critic, even of politics, considers that 
Mr. Buchanan lacked will, fortitude and moral courage; 
and professes to believe that if he had possessed "the un- 
conquerable vv'ill of Jackson or the stubborn courage 
of Taylor he could have changed the history of the 
revolt against the Union." John Sherman recalls in his 
"Recollections" with manifest self-satisfaction that he 
wrote, in December, 1860, "Treason sits in the councils 
and timidity controls the executive power;" and, comment- 
ing in 1895, on Mr. Buchanan's attitude, he characterizes 
it as "feebleness, vacillation and dishonor." Schurz de- 
nounces him as "the most miserable presidential figure in 
American history." Mr. Elson, whose work is probably 
the best of all the single-volume histories, calls him "a 
weak and vacillating president." 

Noah Brooks, in his life of Lincoln, stigmatizes his prede- 
cessor as cowardly, senile and vacillating, because he did 
not stamp out secession and reinforce Fort Sumter. John 
T. Morse, who has carefully excluded Buchanan from his 
"American Statesman Series," though it comprises many 
men of much inferior rank, arraigns him bitterly in the 
life of Lincoln, which he himself wrote ; and yet page after 
page of it discredits his own estimate. 

I could multiply these citations almost without limit. 
Let it suffice to recall that Horace Greely, the very rankest 
of disunionists, in his "Recollections," finds it impossible 



ON THE EVE OF THE REBELLION 11 

to reconcile Mr. Buchanan's conduct at the initial stages of 
the rebellion with any other hypothesis than that of " secret 
pledges made by him, or for him, to the Southern leaders, 
when he was an aspirant to the presidency, that fettered 
and paralyzed him when they perverted the power enjoyed 
by them, as members of his cabinet, to the disruption and 
overthrow of the Union." 

AN UNJUST JUDGMENT. 

I recall these opinions and I cite this very general judg- 
ment of contemporary history for the purpose of demon- 
strating that they are unhistorical, unjudicial, untrue, un- 
just and cruel. The subject affords fresh illustration of 
how easily Error and Falsehood can outrun Justice and 
Truth in a short race. A very brief examination into the 
facts of the case will, on the other hand, demonstrate how 
simple it is for those who earnestly desire and honestly 
strive to get at the truth to ascertain and grasp it. 

From the same authorities whose opinions I have quoted 
I reach and undertake to sustain certain conclusions of fact 
which utterly subvert, undermine and reverse these false 
and mistaken judgments. From their own admissions it 
is manifest that Mr. Buchanan was no more of a disunionist 
than Mr. Lincoln, and not nearly so much of one as Seward, 
Greely, Beecher or Wendell Phillips; that the doctrine of 
secession, the right of a State to withdraw from the Federal 
Union, was not solely indigenous to the South; that the 
views of the Buchanan administration on the constitutional 
right of the executive to coerce a seceding state, or to make 
war on its people, were exactly those then held by sulostan- 
tially all the great lawyers, judges and statesmen of the 
country, including Abraham Lincoln; that there was no 
spoliation of the public treasury, no apportionment of the 
federal military equipment, nor dispersion of the navy in 



^^ Buchanan's administration 

the interest of any particular section; that in his efforts to 
maintain peace and prevent dismemberment of the Union 
Mr. Buchanan^ was more aggressive, positive and definite 
than was Mr. Lincoln at the time ; that his Secretary of State 
during the time the secession movement was organizino-' 
was more courageous and determined than Mr. Lincoln'^s 
premier, even after rebellion became far more defiant and 
threatening; that the attitude of Lincoln's administration 
toward the Confederate agents of peace was more concilia- 
tory than Buchanan's; that in his efforts to preserve peace 
and effect a compromise, Mr. Buchanan had the encoura-e- 
ment and support of an overwhelming majority of the 
Northern people, and was hearkening to the almost unani- 
mous voice of those who represented their great moral and 
material interests; that no act of his liastened or encoura-ed 
the outbreak of hostilities, and that nothing he might have 
done, and left undone, could have checked, prevented or 
suppressed the rebellion and the ensuing war; that Mr 
Lincoln's utterances against force, invasion of Southern 
territory and resort to arms, from the time of his election 
until his inauguration, were much more emphatic for peace 
and concihation than Mr. Buchanan's; that a Republican 
ilouse of Representatives and Congress, as a whole, during 
that period, did nothing, and did not offer to do anything 
to justify or support the president in assuming any other 
attitude toward the South or its rebellion than he assumed 
—in short, that Mr. Buchanan did no less than Mr. Lincoln 
would or could have done in his place during those four 
months, and Mr. Lincoln did, dared and said nothing be- 
fore, at and immediately after his inauguration to show he 
was not in full accord and sympathy with the policies of 
the Buchanan administration. 

As to the general proposition of acknowledging the right 
of secession or the policy of disunion, there is not to\e 



ON THE EVE OF THE REBELLION 13 

found a line or letter in any document Mr. Buchanan ever 
wrote, or in any speech he ever uttered, to justify such an 
aspersion. While extremists North and South concurred 
in this view, he never entertained nor countenanced it. 
He was a Jackson Democrat from start to finish, and went 
the whole length of that warrior-statesman in antagonism 
to Calhoun's doctrine of nullification — which must not be 
confounded with secession. Some of the most eminent 
representatives of Southern sentiment, like Jefferson 
Davis, who believed in the right of secession, disputed 
nullification; and others — like Alexander H. Stephens and 
John B. Floyd — who conceded the right of secession, had 
consistently demonstrated the political and economic folly 
of its exercise. Howell Cobb, in his canvass for Governor 
of Georgia, had made an able and powerful argument 
against the right of secession; and Mr. Buchanan himself 
records that this was the principal reason he selected Cobb 
for a seat in his cabinet. 

On the other hand, there can be no mistake about the 
strong sentiment of the Abolitionists and the New Eng- 
landers generally, of such advanced leaders as Josiah Quincy, 
and John Quincy Adams, in their time, and of Horace Greely, 
William H. Seward, Henry Ward Beecher, William Lloyd 
Garrison and Wendell Phillips, of a later day, that secession 
was right and disunion was desirable. 

It was in Massachusetts, not in Alabama; by the Aboli- 
tionists, not the Democrats ; led by Garrison, not by Davis, 
Toombs or Yancey — that the Constitution of the United 
States was publicly biu-ned; the few hisses and wrathful 
exclamations that the deed drew forth were overborne by 
a thousand shouts of "Amen." It is an indisputable his- 
torical fact that when the extreme anti-slavery Northerners 
felt the constitutional contract and the final judicial con- 
struction of it warranted not only the existence of human 



14 Buchanan's administration 

slavery, but its extension into the territories; that the en- 
forcement of the Fugitive Slave Law was a duty imposed 
upon the States and on their people, and that there was no 
legal escape from these logical conclusions, they were quite 
ready to declare the Federal Constitution a "league with 
death, and a covenant with hell;" to "half mast the starry 
flag, tear down the flaunting lie;" and to submit to a dis- 
solution of the compact of the States. It is reasonable to 
suppose that had the law been, or had it been construed to 
be, otherwise, the Southern extremists would have been 
just as disloyal and refractory, for it is as true of the right- 
eous as of the rogues that they ne'er feel the halter draw, 
"with good opinion of the law." 

It is quite true, the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions 
of 1798 and 1799 declared the rights of States to nullify 
Federal statutes; but the Federalists, in opposing the an- 
nexation of Louisiana and the war of 1812, and the Hart- 
ford Convention of 1814, proclaimed the right of secession 
in even more defiant terms; and down until the thunder of 
hostile cannon shook the land, the great body of Northern 
Abolitionists believed in the political preaching of Jedidiah 
Morse, that New England should get out of the Lhiion to 
get rid of slavery. 

On the other hand, John C. Ropes, v/hose "Story of the 
Civil War" is probably the fairest and keenest of like 
dimensions yet written, says not a word dropped from 
Buchanan's lips to encourage the Southern hope "that the 
North would consent to a peaceable dissolution of the 
Union;" "nor did he ever yield an iota on the point of the 
abstract right of the Federal Government to maintain its 
hold on all the Southern forts." 



ON THE EVE OF THE REBELLION 15 



ALL SECTIONS OPPOSED TO WAR. 

None the less, the great mass of the people, North and 
South, were neither for disunion nor for war. They were 
favorable to almost any compromise on the slavery ques- 
tion that would preserve peace and union ; and Mr. Lincoln, 
long after the war began, expressed the popular notion 
when he said that if he could save the Union by destroying 
slavery he would destroy it, but that if he could save the 
Union by continuing slavery he was for its continuance. 
His inaugural pledged him to enforce the fugitive slave law. 

I am not now concerned to inquire whether this view 
was sagacious or ethical, humane or even statesmanlike. 
My proposition is that in the winter of 1860 and 1861 it 
was the view of the great majority of the Northern people; 
that Mr. Lincoln reflected and espoused it as fully and sin- 
cerely, and expressed it as freely and unmistakably, as Mr. 
Buchanan; and that it is a shallow, false and wicked judg- 
ment which reprobates the one as cov\-ardly and senile and 
praises the other as brave and sensible for cherishing the 
same notions, even though they were erroneous. 

I hasten to the support of my second proposition, that 
they concurred in their views as to what was then dis- 
cussed as the right and policy of "coercion." The expiring 
Thirty-sixth Congress met less than a month after Lincoln's 
election. That House was in full control of the Republicans, 
and they had elected the next Congress. Within three 
months they would be in complete power. " Mr. Buchanan 
has been chiefly denounced for the tone of his annual 
message to that Congress. Not a blow had been struck; 
no State had passed an ordinance of secession; the North 
did not believe the South would secede; the South did not 
believe the North would fight. The discussion was as yet 
only academic. 



16 Buchanan's administration 

Nevertheless, the New York "Tribune," whose editor 
was the most potential force in nominating and electing 
Mr. Lincoln, and which newspaper was " the most powerful 
organ of its party," declared three days after his election: 
"If the cotton States shall decide that they can do better 
out of the Union than in it, we insist on letting them go in 
peace. The right to secede may be a revolutionary one, 
hut it exists nevertheless. * * * We shall resist all 
coercive measures." These views were reiterated from 
day to day. They were re-echoed by the Albany " Evening 
Journal," edited by Thurlow Weed, the nearest friend of 
Mr. Seward. Henry Ward Beecher, in his famous Boston 
speech, declared, about the same time, "I hold it will be 
an advantage for the South to go off." Gen. Scott, who had 
been a Whig candidate for president, who was the Com- 
manding General of the Army, and who later became one 
of Mr. Buchanan's severest critics, in his famous "Views," 
of October, 1860, had said: "To save time, the right of 
secession may be conceded." In March, 1861, when he was 
most intimate with Secretary Seward, and was discouraging 
the relief of Sumter, he urged the North to say to the seced- 
ing States, "Wayward Sisters, go in peace." 

If Mr. Lincoln antagonized these notions, he at least made 
no serious sound nor sign. He was the rising sun ; Buchanan 
was an evening star; and any views a retiring president 
might have had to express would have been cold and feeble 
rays by contrast with the bursting effulgence of the great 
orb of day. If the clarion call to battle was to be then 
sounded, it ought to have emanated from Springfield; if 
there was a demand for a Jackson, he should have ridden, 
like "Young Lochinvar," "out of the West." 

Nevertheless, while the leaders of Mr. Lincoln's party, 
and the chieftains of his campaign, were thus proclaiming 
the right of disunion and encouraging the South to secede, 



ON THE EVE OF THE REBELLION 17 

Mr. Buchanan declared in his message that grave danger 
threatened the country against which he had long sounded 
warnings; he prayed God to preserve the Constitution and 
the Union throughout all generations; with courteous re- 
gard for his successor, he proclaimed that he had been 
fairly and constitutionally elected, and that his success 
justified no revolution; he recognized guarantees that Mr. 
Lincoln "would not attempt violation of any clear con- 
stitutional right." He stated the doctrine of secession 
and denounced it as " wholly inconsistent with the history 
as well as the character of the Constitution," and cited 
Jackson and Madison, Southern statesmen, to contravene 
it. With fine touches of eloquence, he said: 

"This government, therefore, is a great and powerful 
government, invested with all the attributes of sovereignty 
over the special subjects to which its authority extends. 
Its framers never intended to implant in its bosom the seeds 
of its own destruction, nor were they at its creation guilty 
of the absurdity of providing for its own dissolution. It 
was not intended by its framers to be 'the baseless fabric 
of a vision,' which, at the touch of the enchanter, would 
vanish into thin air, but a substantial and mighty fabric, 
capable of resisting the slow decay of time, and of defying 
the storms of ages." 
Again he said: 

"The fact is, that our Union rests upon public opinion, 
and can never be cemented by the blood of its citizens shed 
in civil war. If it cannot live in the affections of the people, 
it must one day perish. Congress possesses many means of 
preserving it by conciliation ; but the sword was not placed 
in their hand to preserve it by force. 

" But may I be permitted solemnly to invoke my country- 
men to pause and deliberate, before they determine to de- 
stroy this, the grandest temple which has ever been dedi- 



18 Buchanan's administration 

cated to human freedom since the world began. It has 
been consecrated by the blood of our fathers, by the glories 
of the past and by the hopes of the future. The Union has 
already made us the most prosperous, and ere long will, 
if preserved, render us the most powerful nation on the face 
of the earth. In every foreign region of the globe the title 
of American citizen is held in the highest respect, and when 
pronounced in a foreign land, it causes the hearts of our 
countrymen to swell with honest pride. Surely, when we 
reach the brink of the yawning abyss, we shall recoil with 
horror from the last fatal plunge. 

"By such a dread catastrophe, the hopes of the friends 
of freedom throughout the world would be destroyed, and 
a long night of leaden despotism would enshroud the nations. 
Our example for more than eighty years would not only be 
lost, but it would be quoted as conclusive proof that man 
is unfit for self-government." 

I might quote many like passages throbbing with the 
loftiest patriotism. Certainly no man can recall them 
without feeling that the touching and oft-quoted sentiments 
of Mr. Lincoln's inaugural reached no higher plane of 
patriotic sentiment and touched no deeper chord of popular 
feeling. George Ticknor Curtis, a Yankee of Yankees, who 
had argued the Dred Scott case for the slave, declares: 
"After a long familiarity with our constitutional literature, 
I know of no document vv^hich, within the same compass, 
states so clearly and accurately what I regard as the true 
theory of our Constitution as this message of President 
Buchanan. Had I the power to change it, I v»"ould not 
alter a word." It may be said that Mr. Curtis was the paid 
biographer of Mr. Buchanan ; but he was also the biographer 
of Mr. Webster, and he had a reputation as a constitutional 
lawyer that he would not risk for any paltry reward of 
political literature. 



ON THE EVE OF THE REBELLION 



19 



NEITHER TIMID NOR WEAK. 

Meantime, as conditions changed, the situation became 
more alarming. States seceded. Congressmen withdrew and 
cabinet ministers w^ho sympathized with secession quit or 
were forced out of his cabinet, but Mr. Buchanan only per- 
sisted and became correspondingly more emphatic in his 
acts and utterances. There was, however, no reversion nor 
inconsistency in the executive position— neither tnmdity 
nor show of M-eakness. In his special message of January 
8, 1861, he repeated his conviction that "no State has a 
right by its own act to secede from the Union or throw off 
its Federal obligations at pleasure." While he declared, 
in almost the same terms that ]\Ir. Lincoln adopted— months 
later and when the rebellion was far more advanced— that 
he "had no right to make aggressive war upon any State," 
he declared, on the other hand, in words that his successor, 
sixty days later, almost identically appropriated, "The right 
and duty to use military force defensively against those who 
resist the Federal officers in the execution of their legal 
functions, and against those who assail the property of the 
Federal Government, is clear and undeniable." Lawyer 
and statesman as he was, he knew the limitations upon the 
executive, and what were the constitutional prerogatives 
of the legislative branch of government. He had taken a 
solemn o^ath to regard both these, and he was liable to 
impeachment and subject to disgrace if he dicl not. He 
declared Congress, which was in session, to be "the only 
tribunal under Providence possessing the power to meet 
the existing emergency." He said : " To them, exclusively, 
belongs the power to declare war, or to authorize the em- 
ployment of military force in all cases contemplated by the 
Constitution; and they alone possess the power to remove 
grievances which might lead to war, and to secure peace 



20 Buchanan's administration 

and union to this distracted country. On them, and on 
them alone, rests the responsibihty." 

In his views and in his manner of expressing them, the 
president not only had the advice and cordial approval of 
his Attorney-General, Jeremiah S. Black — to whom Rhodes 
gives unstinted praise for purity, patriotism, statesman- 
ship and legal learning — but what is far more to our present 
purpose, all that Buchanan then said and all he did had the 
legal, cordial and unqualified support of three other mem- 
bers of his cabinet, who subsequently became most illus- 
trious leaders of the Republican party, Edwin M. Stanton, 
the great War Secretary — the erection of a statue to him 
has just been recommended by Secretary Taft; Joseph Holt, 
to whom, after eminent service, Lincoln offered the Attor- 
ney Generalship; John A. Dix, later a Major General, Re- 
publican Governor of New York and Ambassador to France 
-^and yet best remembered because, as a Democrat, and 
from his seat in Buchanan's cabinet, he sent out that thrill- 
ing message, "If any man hauls down the American flag, 
shoot him on the spot." Judge Holt is on record as testi- 
fying that Mr. Buchanan's official labors ought to be 
crowned by the glory that belongs " to an enlightened states- 
manship and unsullied patriotism." 

Not only did they all accept, approve and stand by their 
chief's public declarations, but they remained in his confi- 
dence and trusting him until he took his seat beside Mr. 
Lincoln in the carriage which bore them to the ceremony 
of transferring the presidency. It is inconceivable that 
these eminent loyalists and high-minded gentlemen could 
have stayed in his political household if he was the base 
and timid creature whom partisan historians have pictured 
and pilloried. Whether he dominated them or subjected 
himself to their guidance, it is an indecent judgment that 
stigmatizes the administration of which they were all 
members as "weak" or "disloyal." 



ON THE EVE OF THE REBELLION 21 

Meantime, what answer was Congress, with a RepubUcan 
House of Representatives, making to the executive alarms 
and appeals? For three months, to the last day of his 
administration, that body remained in session; and Buch- 
anan exhausted all power he had over its successor by call- 
ing an extra session of the Senate, to meet March 5, 1861. 
While the outgoing Congress repudiated all proposals of 
compromise to prevent civil war, it took no measures what- 
ever to retain the cotton or the border States within the 
Union. It heard of one State seceding after another, and 
witnessed the withdrawal of member after member of 
Congress. The senators who had listened with "cold 
neutrality" to Jefferson Davis's vindictive attacks upon 
Mr. Buchanan, for denying the right o£ secession, sobbed 
with personal sympathy when Mr. Davis delivered his 
famous and pathetic speech of withdrawal from association 
with his colleagues. That even then this most conspicuous 
of Southern leaders was not without hope of a peaceful 
reconciliation is attested by a touching domestic annal, 
recorded by Mrs. Davis: "Inexpressibly sad he left the 
Senate chamber with faint hope; and that night I heard 
the oft-reiterated prayer: 'May God have us in His holy 
keeping, and grant that before it is too late peaceful coun- 
sels may prevail.'" 

AN INACTIVE CONGRESS. 

It makes nothing against Mr. Buchanan's policy to 
undertake to justify the inaction of Congress by the tre- 
mendous political and popular efforts then making in 
every quarter to effect a compromise and avert war ; or by 
the very general belief that any aggression by Congress 
would fan into conflagration a flame, otherwise soon to 
flicker out. Certainly if the only branch of government to 
which are entrusted the raising of money, the equipment 



22 Buchanan's administration 

of armies and the declaration and carrying on of war re- 
mained inert, after repeated warnings, no right nor power 
existed in the president to supplant or even supplement it. 
All the more was this the case in view of the fact that a 
new executive was so soon to be inaugurated and a new 
Congress quahfied. 

It must also be remembered that although the Federal 
statutes then gave the executive power to call forth the 
militia to suppress insurrections against a State Govern- 
ment, no such power existed to suppress insurrections 
against the Federal Government. This omission was per- 
mitted to exist until after the end of Mr. Buchanan's term ; 
its grant to Lincoln, by the Act of July 29, 1861, was evi- 
dence of the necessity for it. Every request for like power 
to President Buchanan was ignored; and even after forts 
and mints had been seized, and the aggressions begun 
which he always declared would justify defensive warfare, 
a bill to give the president power to call out militia or accept 
volunteers to protect and recover military forts, magazines, 
arsenals and other property belonging to the United States 
was withdrawn the same day it was reported — killed as soon 
as it saw light. Four bills in all to furnish the president 
with military means to provide for the collection of duties 
at Southern ports of entry were introduced and not one of 
them was passed. 

Nor let it be forgotten that when President Jackson 
grappled with nullification, a patriotic Congress gave him 
the "Compromise Act" and "Force Bill", which enabled 
him to act with vigor and success. These powers expired 
by limitation in 1834, and what had been given to Jackson 
then was persistently denied to his loyal follower in the 
executive chair in 1861. A striking contrast of legislative 
support to the executive is afforded by the alacrity with 
which Congress strengthened Madison's hands, in 1812; 



ON THE EVE OF THE REBELLION 23 

likewise the wild rush with which a later Congress led, if 
it did not drive, McKinley to war with Spain. 

In the face of these historical facts, what a pitiful sub- 
terfuge to lay the blame of the war or the earlier successes 
of the Confederacy to the deliberate dispersion of the army 
and nav}'', the surrender of forts and stores and the plunder 
of the arsenals — with connivance of the Federal adminis- 
tration! I pause with little patience to refute these well- 
worn lies. Any student or inquirer who really wants to 
get at the truth can easily reach the head- waters ; though it 
is certainly discouraging to see how recklessly the falsehood 
persists. Mr. Buchanan effectually refuted it in his book, 
published in 1865; Judge Black apparently stamped the 
life out of it in his unanswerable letters to Henry Wilson; 
as early as 1861, a Republican committee of a Republican 
House, organized to convict ex-Secretary Floyd, the very 
head and front of this offending, reported the case not 
made out, its chairman expressed the opinion that the 
charges were founded in "rumor, speculation and misap- 
prehension." The facts were that of the useful muskets 
distributed by the Government in 1860, the Northern 
States received three times as many as the Southern ; of the 
rifles, there were divided in all between six Southern States 
scarcely enough in the aggregate for half a regiment. Two 
years before Lincoln was elected the Government had con- 
demned as worthless and unserviceable 500,000 muskets — 
and after nobody could be induced to buy them at any 
price, less than one-third of these condemned weapons were 
shipped to Southern arsenals, in order to make room in 
Northern storehouses for useful and effective arms. As 
their recoil was worse than their discharge, the North 
would have been lucky had the Confederates got the whole 
of them. The story of the cannon surreptitiously shipped 
from Pittsburg to Galveston is best answered by a resolu- 



24 Buchanan's administration 

tion of the Northern City's Councils, officially thanking 
Buchanan, Black and Holt for preventing any such ship- 
ment. Mr. Rhodes, after careful investigation of the 
whole story, unhestiatingly accepts the refutation of these 
long-lived canards. Gen. Samuel W. Crawford, one of the 
few who were in Fort Sumter when the flag went down, 
and again when it was hauled up, in his "Genesis of the 
Civil War," also demonstrates their falsity. 

The idea that the naval arm of the government's power 
was disarranged to favor secession has not the slightest 
historic foundation. The head of that department was a 
New England Unionist, Isaac Toucey. He was a man of 
utmost loyalty and highest integrity. Every attempt by 
official investigation failed to discredit him. He fully sat- 
isfied a hostile Senate Committee that at the outbreak of 
Secession our squadrons at foreign stations were feeble; 
they had not been augmented in proportion to the increase 
of our commerce ; none of them could have been diminished 
without sacrificing its safety and the interests and safety 
of those engaged in it. While the nation was praying and 
protesting that war might be averted, to have recalled our 
foreign squadrons certainly would have been "lunatic 
rashness;" and it would only have helped to "make 
trouble," without contributing to its suppression or relief. 

One of the most frequent of the reckless accusations 
against Mr. Buchanan is that when the Federal office-holders 
in the seceding States abandoned their places, he did not 
promptly fill them. He repeatedly demonstrated to Con- 
gress that he could get no other citizens of these States 
to take the offices and discharge their duties; but, as Mr. 
Rhodes frankly points out, when he named for Collector 
of Charleston, Peter Mclntire, of Pennsylvania, an emi- 
nently fit man, of high courage and decision of character, 
the Senate never acted on the nomination ; and, in brief, no 



ON THE EVE OF THE REBELLION 25 

Congressional aid whatever was extended to the president 
in any effort to avert war, effect compromise, defend the 
government property, re-take miUtary stations or fill the 
abandoned posts of civil duty. 

THE VOICE OF THE PEOPLE. 

But if the action— or rather, the non-action — of Congress 
justified the attitude and conduct of the administration in 
those days of doubt, how immeasurably more was it the 
reflection of and backed by the overwhelming voice of the 
people, all over the North, and manifested in so many and 
various forms? 

While the venerable Crittenden was so strenuously urging 
upon Congress the adoption of his compromise measures, 
the country waited patiently to see if Mr. Seward — destined 
to sit at Mr. Lincoln's right hand — was to unite the genius 
of Clay for compromise with the enthusiasm of Webster for 
the Union. The radical Republicans of the North, and the 
fire-eating Secessionists of the South, were alike disappoint- 
ed, and no authoritative voice from the new administration 
commanded attention or following. 

John Sherman says: "At this time the pubhc mind in 
the North was decidedly in favor of concessions to the 
South. The Democrats of the North would have agreed 
to any proposition to secure peace and the Union, and the 
Republicans would have acquiesced in the Crittenden 
compromise or in any measure approved by Lincoln and 
Seward." 

Had the incoming Lincoln administration then declared 
for compromise, there would have been no war. Had it 
declared for effective and aggressive measures of coercion, 
it would only have hastened the outbreak of hostilities at 
a time when the country was even less prepared for and 
more averse to it than when Sumter was fired upon. How- 



26 Buchanan's administration 

ever, the oracle was dumb — and nothing that can be said 
in denunciation of Buchanan's vacillation and uncertainty 
cannot be said with far more truth and more force of Mr. 
Lincoln, of those who had been his chief supporters and of 
those who were about to become his Cabinet Council. 

Another illustration of the preponderating public desire 
— North and South — to avert war is found in the response 
which answered Virginia's call for a Peace Congress. 
Twenty-one States sent commissioners to assemble on the 
same day that only six of the Cotton States met to form 
the Southern Confederacy. The Peace Congress was made 
up of men of "character, ability and distinction." One of 
the Pennsylvania delegates was our own late townsman, 
Hon. Thomas E. Franklin. An eminent lawyer, a man of 
property, lineage and high social position, a churchman 
and a Republican in politics, he was a fine type of the best 
citizenship of that day. The ''plan of adjustment" this 
conference agreed upon was not accepted vv^ith favor by 
Congress. I do not refer to it in approval, but only to 
further illustrate the earnest, organized, official efforts 
making for peace. For a president to have arrested or 
disturbed them by precipitate call to arms would have been 
met with overwhelming rebuke and indignation; it could 
only have weakened the Union cause and invigorated the 
aggressions of the Disunionists. Absolute proof of this 
contention is afforded by the contemporary expressions of 
popular opinion, and by the utterances not only of Mr. 
Lincoln, on his way from his Illinois home to the White 
House, but from the lips of men who already were, or were 
to become, pillars of his administration and party. Gen. 
Daniel E. Sicldes, who is the only living member of that 
memorable House of 1860-1, and who became a Union hero 
and a Republican martyr — threatened that the secession 
of the Southern States would be followed by New York 



ON THE EVE OF THE REBELLION 27 

City; Gen. Dix concurred; Senator Simon Cameron — Lin- 
coln's first Secretary of War — was desirous of saving the 
Union and preserving peace "at the sacrifice not only of 
feeling, but of principle." 

All reliable authorities agree that up to, and for a con- 
siderable time after, the end of Mr. Buchanan's term, a 
large majority of the people of the North, and a very con- 
siderable portion of the South, were earnestly for peace — 
at almost any price. Tumultuous popular assemblies all 
over the North loudly voiced this demand. In the Re- 
publican city of Philadelphia, in Independence Hall, where 
American freedom was born. Bishop Potter blessing the 
gathering and the cause, and Mayor Henry presiding, elo- 
quent orators of all parties were cheered to the echo when 
they pleaded and declared in town meeting for a policy of 
forbearance and protection to the slaveholders in their 
constitutional rights. In the city of Boston, head and 
heart of New England, Faneuil Hall, "the cradle of liberty," 
rocked with the surging oratory of like appeals. In the 
very recently published life — almost an autobiography — 
of William Pitt Fessenden, it is recorded that "in all the 
great cities, especially among public men, it was hoped that 
a compromise would be effected. * * * Republican 
who favored a vigorous policy, seemed temporarily out of 
favor. Conciliation was the popular term. Mr. Lincoln 
believed that gentleness and a conciliatory attitude would 
prevent secession." 

It is true that the voice of Senator "Zach" Chandler 
sounded discordant above the prevailing placidity; but his 
sanguinary expressions that "without a little blood-letting 
this Union will not be worth a rush" — like the gory demand 
of a Southern bravado that "we must sprinkle blood in 
their faces" — was generally regarded as incendiary and 
fratricidal — if not impious. Even the fierce and fiery 



28 Buchanan's administration 

John A. Logan testifies that he " believed in exhausting all 
peaceable means before a resort to arms." 

FOR PEACE AT ANY PRICE. 

Appleton's Annual Encyclopaedia for 1861 estimates that 
of four million voters for president, over three million 
would have approved such a peaceable settlement of the 
difficulties as might have been satisfactory to all the South- 
ern States whose complaints were founded upon questions 
connected with slavery. " The voice of the people of the 
country at that time," this authority says, "was overwhelm- 
ingly in favor of conciliation, forbearance and compro- 
mise." 

Thurlow Weed, the confidential adviser of Seward, urged 
concession and a constitutional convention. The New 
York "Herald" deprecated coercion and declared each 
State had the right to break the tie of the Confederacy and 
to repel coercion as a nation might repel invasion. 

Nor did this prevailing condition of popular sentiment 
terminate with Mr. Buchanan's retirement. Mr. Morse 
admits that during all the three months in which his con- 
duct has been so savagely criticised, one-half the people of 
the South were opposed to division; in the North every- 
where v/ords of compromise and secession were spoken; 
coercion was mentioned only to be denounced. Had the 
executive, he concedes, "asserted the right and duty of 
forcible coercion, he would not have found at his back the 
indispensable force, moral and physical, of the people." 
For over a month of the Lincoln administration this state 
of popular feeling continued, and up to the very time of 
firing on Fort Sumter, he says " the almost universal feeling 
of the people at the North, so far as it could be discerned, 
was compromising, conciliatory and strongly opposed to 
any act of war." 



ON THE EVE OF THE REBELLION 29 

As late as April 5, 1861, Gen. Robert Anderson wrote, 
in a private letter, that he must take upon himself all the 
blame for the government not sending him relief. Had he 
demanded re-inforcements, he says he knows President 
Buchanan's Secretary of War would have dispatched them 
at all hazards ; but he says he knew the coming of additional 
troops would inaugurate civil war; and his policy, he de- 
clares, was to keep still and preserve peace. 

Because, then, "a little fire" ultimately kindled "a great 
matter," shall one be denounced as "timid" or "traitor- 
ous" because he strove to quench the spark, or refused to 
blow it into ravaging flame? 

Surely it is not necessary to show that during all this 
period, and even later, Mr. Lincoln was in full accord with 
the policy of his predecessor and his own party; that he 
was alike submissive to and controlled by the manifest 
popular will of the Union-loving and peace-seeking part of 
the country. Neither one moved more slowly toward war 
than the other; and no faster in accelerating the outbreak 
of hostilities. 

But to clinch a proposition which I earnestly maintain 
has been nailed fast, let us swiftly follow Mr. Lincoln's tour 
eastward. He said at one place— and I challenge you to 
find it more strongly stated in any of Mr. Buchanan's 
utterances— " The marching of an army into South Caro- 
lina without the consent of her people, and with hostile 
intent toward them, would be invasion; and it would be 
coercion, also, if the South Carolinians were forced to 
submit." 

Remembering the declarations of himself and his party's 
platform against the lawless "invasion" of any State, what 
less or more could these words mean to the South than its 
people inferred from any declaration Mr. Buchanan had 
made? 



30 Buchanan's administration 

At Columbus, Mr. Lincoln expressed much less solicitude 
about the future than President Buchanan was exhibiting. 
He said : " Nobody is suffering anything * * * all we want 
is time, patience and a reliance on that God who has never 
forsaken His people." At Pittsburg he declared there was 
" no crisis but an artificial one," and predicted that if people 
only kept cool, the trouble would come to an end. In Phila- 
delphia he assumed a decidedly anti-war tone : " There need 
be no bloodshed or war. There is no necessity for it. I 
am not in favor of such a course; * * * there will be no 
bloodshed unless it be forced upon the government, and 
then it will be compelled to act in self-defense." "The crisis, 
the panic, the anxiety of the country at this time is artificial." 
At Harrisburg, when the speaker of welcome tendered him 
military support from Pennsylvania, Lincoln rebuked him, 
and said : " It is not with any pleasure that I contemplate the 
possibility that a necessity may arise in this country for the 
use of the mihtary arm." 

In none of these is heard the voice of the " Son of Thun- 
der" — at no time the iron ring of the "Rough Ptider's" 
hoofs. It is true, he said, ''the right of a State to secede 
is not an open or debatable question," but Mr. Buchanan 
had said exactly this to Congress and the country two 
months earlier. The concluding words of the Lincoln in- 
augural are classic in the literature of eloquence; but in 
parallel passages with extracts already quoted from Mr. 
Buchanan's message, these latter may challenge comparison 
for sound law, lofty patriotism and even for rich rhetoric. 

MR» LINCOLN'S EARLY ATTITUDE. 

The incoming president reiterated the pledge of his plat- 
form that each separate state had a right to control its own do- 
mestic institutions ; he denounced the lawless invasion of the 
soil of any State or Territory by armed force as the gravest of 



ON THE EVE OF THE REBELLION 31 

crimes. He gave his full adherence to the fugitive slave 
law and its enforcement, as guaranteed by the constitution. 
Strictly in accord with the policy and declarations of Mr. 
Buchanan, he promised there should be no bloodshed or 
violence unless forced upon the National authority; that 
Federal property would be protected and the Federal reve- 
nues collected, but, beyond what might be necessary for 
this, he declared there would be "no invasion, no using of 
force against or among the people anywhere." To the 
criticism that Mr. Buchanan had not filled the vacant 
Federal offices in the South, Mr. Lincoln then made an 
answer, that ought to be conclusive now : " While the strict 
legal right may exist in the Government to enforce the ex- 
ercise of these offices, the attempt to do so would be so irri- 
tating, and so nearly impracticable withal, I deem it better 
for the time to forego for the time the uses of such offices." 
Mr. Elson admits that this was a plain avowal that he 
would follow Buchanan's policy for the time in his attitude 
toward Secession. 

The only significant act of the Congress just deceased 
had been to adopt a constitutional amendment practically 
making it impossible to ever abolish or interfere with slav- 
ery. Mr. Lincoln went out of his way to say not only that 
that was already implied constitutional law, but he set his 
personal stamp of approval upon it by saying, " I have no 
objections to its being made express and irrevocable." 
And yet for signing the measure which the noble Lincoln 
thus approved, the despised Buchanan is denounced by 
many so-called historians of the present day as a dough- 
faced dotard and a double-dyed dastard! 

Surely when Thersites plays the role of Herodotus and 
Plutarch, Clio must hide her face in shame. 

Old Richard W. Thompson, as garrulous as most men 
must be who boast and write "Recollections of Sixteen 



32 Buchanan's administration 

Presidents," sees in Buchanan's peace policy an imitation 
of Nero fiddling while Rome burned; but Mr. Lincoln's 
similar temporizing is to the same dim eyes due only to 
"the promptings of his own generous nature" and the hope 
that his appeal to the reason and patriotism of the Seces- 
sionists would not be unavailing. 

Is it any wonder Sir Robert Walpole said: "Anything 
but history for history must be false!" 

It is often said that when Mr. Lincoln raised the flag 
over Independence Hall a new star glittered in the field; 
but the act admitting the thirty-fourth State was approved 
by Mr. Buchanan; and "bleeding Kansas" — so long the 
spoil of contending foes — alternately outraged like the 
Sabine matrons and slashed like the stainless daughter of 
Virginius — now quite recovered from her wounds and woes, 
without a furrow on her forehead or a ruffle on her raiment, 
quietly glided into the sisterhood of States at the pen 
stroke of a Democratic executive. 

But if Mr. Lincoln was no advance upon Mr. Buchanan 
in aggressiveness and indicated no departure from his policy 
in the inaugural, how much more bloodthirsty and bellig- 
erent was his attitude during the month or more that passed 
before rebel guns boomed across the placid waters of Charles- 
ton harbor? 

At the risk of having to tire your patience and confront 
melting ice cream and cooling coffee, for the sake of too 
tardy justice to a man long dead — and very dead — I beg 
you hear briefly the story of those five weeks ; and remember 
how much further and with what long leaps Rebellion had 
advanced. 

The most notable cabinet appointments were, of course, 
the Secretaries of State and of War. We have already seen 
how much further Seward was willing to go in surrender of 
the Union than Buchanan ; and surely it was not so serious 



ON THE EVE OF THE REBELLION 33 

a strain upon Cameron to "sacrifice principle" for policy — 
for in this respect he and Buchanan furnished life-long 
illustrations of opposing ideas of public duty and political 
propriety. 

Nicolay and Hay give their subject credit for "infinite 
tact" in dealing with Mr. Seward; but is it permissible to 
find treason, cowardice and timidity in Mr. Buchanan's 
dalliance with incipient secession in the closet and yet 
praise the attitude of Seward and Lincoln in temporizing 
with full-armed Rebellion in the open? 

John Sherman admits that the first forty days of the 
Lincoln administration was the darkest hour in the history 
of the United States. He declares that it was "a time of 
humiliation, timidity and feebleness." Sumner deprecated 
Lincoln's "deplorable hesitancy." Six weeks after his 
inauguration, Stanton wrote to Buchanan that there was 
a strong feeling of distrust in the candor and sincerity of 
Lincoln personally and of his cabinet. Emerson, with 
rare literary skill, condones the president's perplexities 
because "the new pilot was hurried to the helm in a tor- 
nado." 

It is to the discredit of our political system — no par- 
ticular reproach to Mr. Lincoln — that for months the chief 
concern of his administration was the distribution of the 
offices to clamorous partisans, rather than the distribution 
of troops to suppress the rebellion. The demands upon his 
time and the solicitation of his supporters were not to 
avert war, save the Union or suppress the rebels, but to 
lavishly ladle out patronage. Not only do Stanton, Schurz 
and Seward testify to this, but Mr. Lincoln himself said: 
"I seem like one sitting in a palace, assigning apartments 
to importunate applicants, while the structure is on fire 
and Ukely soon to perish." 

With this disaster in prospect, we find, as late as March 



34 Buchanan's administration 

12th, five of his cabinet ministers voting against provision- 
ing Fort Sumter — and onlj'^ one for it. Mr, Lincoln let them 
determine his course. And yet Buchanan was "weak" 
and his cabinet a "nest of traitors," because they had 
not relieved and supported Major Anderson! As late as 
July 16, 1861, Stanton wrote to Buchanan: "Your adminis- 
tration's policy, in reference to both Sumter and Pickens, 
is fully vindicated by the course of the present administra- 
tion for forty days after the inauguration of Lincoln." 

Mr. Buchanan has been hounded from Dan to Beersheba, 
because three months earlier he had, with courtesy and 
dignity, accorded a single interview to the Commissioners 
from South Carolina. Before the year 1860 closed, he 
had peremptorily rejected their demands for the with- 
drawal of Federal troops from Charleston harbor; he had 
firmly declared to them his purpose to defend Fort Sumter 
by all the means in his power against hostile attacks from 
whatever quarter they might proceed ; and a few days later, 
when they replied disrespectfully, he declined to receive 
their communication or to ever again see or negotiate 
with them. Later, through his Secretary of War, he 
warned South Carolina of the fearful responsibility it took 
if its authorities assaulted Sumter, and by periling the 
lives of " the handful of brave and loyal men shut up within 
its walls," "plunged our common country into the horrors 
of civil war." 

And yet long after Jefferson Davis had been elected 
president of the Confederacy; and while its Congress was 
formulating plans to organize an army and navy; when 
State after State had wheeled into the secession column. 
Confederate Commissioners to the Lincoln administration 
came with confidence to Washington; though they were 
not formally received, they were in close touch with Seward ; 
they remained long enough to get his assurances that the 



ON THE EVE OF THE REBELLION 



35 



evacuation of Fort Sumter was the arranged policy of the 
new administration. Mr. Morse is forced to admit that 
even later Mr. Lincoln gave the Confederates assurances 
that " no provisioning or re-inforcement should be attempted 
without warning"— and it will be remembered that the 
assault only began after he gave such notice. Secretary 
Seward was even then writing to Mr. Charles Francis Adams, 
our minister to England, the hopelessness of carrying on a 
civil war; and so distant seemed the danger of it, that 
Massachusetts, under the lead of her great war governor, 
John A. Andrew, as late as April 11, after havmg made 
military preparations for three months, practically dis- 
armed the Commonwealth. 

About the same time, Wendell Phillips declared the Gult 
States had a right to a separate government and defiantly 
said: "You cannot go through Massachusetts and recruit 
men to bombard Charleston or New Orleans." 

Even when Montgomery Blair— the only Jackson Demo- 
crat in Mr. Lincoln's Cabinet— urged that Fort Sumter be 
relieved without reference to Pickens or any other Federal 
possession-and warned his chief that South Carolina 
would strike a blow at National authority from which it 
would take "years of bloody strife" to recover— Mr. Lin- 
coln, with at least as great "timidity" and "indecision" as 
ever Mr. Buchanan had shown, sided with and acted upon 
the contrary advice of Seward, Chase and Cameron. 

On April 13, the most Mr. Lincoln would say to the Vir- 
ginia Commissioners was that he might repossess himself 
of the public property and suspend the mail service in the 
States then in defiant rebellion against the nation. He 
substantially repeated this in his subsequent message to 
Congress, which, be it noted, he did not assemble for four 

months. . , c • xu- i 

And yet Mr. Blaine, who at times tries to be tair, thinks 



36 Buchanan's administration 

if Buchanan had had Jackson's hickory will and Taylor's 
stubborn courage, history would have been changed. It is 
a little difficult to see why Lincoln could not have called 
these martial "spirits from the vasty deep" as easily as 
Buchanan; they would just as likely have come at one sum- 
mons as the other — as readily in the balmy April spring 
days, when rebellion's crop was high in the stalk, as in the 
cheerless December time, when its roots were yet locked 
in winter's clutch. 

JUDGE BLACX ON MR. BUCHANAN. 

Not to prolong my share in the argument — which we 
shall soon see has another side — nor to multiply illustrations 
from a copious, if not inexhaustible, fountain of authori- 
ties, I quote and adopt a summary of Mr. Buchanan's 
character and conduct from a source so much more authori- 
tative and by a pen so much more skillful than mnne, that 
no paraphrase could fail to mar it: 

"The proofs of his great ability and his eminent public 
services are found on every page of his country's history, 
from 1820 to 1861, During all that long period he steadily, 
faithfully and powerfully sustained the principles of free 
constitutional government. This nation never had a truer 
friend, nor its laws a defender who would more cheerfully 
have given his life to save them from violation. No man 
was ever slandered so brutally. His life was literally 
lied away. In the last months of his administration he 
devoted all the energies of his mind and body to the great 
duty of saving the Union, if possible, from dissolution and 
civil war. He knew all the dangers to which it was exposed, 
and it would, therefore, be vain to say that he was not 
alarmed for his country; but he showed no sign of un- 
manly fear on his own account. He met all his vast re- 
sponsibilities as fairly as any chief magistrate we ever 



ON THE EVE OF THE REBELLION 37 

had. In no case did he shrink from or attempt to evade 
them. The accusation of timidity and indecision is most 
preposterous. His faults were all of another kind ; his reso- 
lutions once formed v/ere generally immovable to a degree 
that bordered on obstinacy. On every matter of great 
importance he deliberated cautiously, and sometimes tried 
the patience of his friends by refusing to act until he had 
made up an opinion which he could Uve and die by. These 
characteristics explain the fact that his whole political life, 
from the time he entered Congress until he retired from 
the presidency — all his acts, speeches and papers — have 
a consistency which belongs to those of no other American 
statesman. He never found it necessary to cross his own 
path or go back upon his pledges." 

I have touched upon a single epoch of his public life — 
a brief three months of his official career — albeit, upon 
another and more fitting occasion I should not shrink from 
the task of maintaining the proposition with which, in 
1883, his biographer concluded his work: "He was the 
most eminent statesman yet given by this great Common- 
wealth to the service of the country since the Constitution 
was established." I re-affirm this, after twenty-five years, 
notwithstanding Senator Penrose is a hopeful candidate 
for re-election; Senator Knox is even a less hopeless candi- 
date for president, and the sculptor has nearly finished the 
heroic statue of Senator Quay, which is soon to add splendor 
to an already too splendid State capitol. 

At the further risk of being tiresome and irrelevant, I 
must ask you to listen to a postscript. I have little faith 
in reported death-bed experiences. Dr. Osier has said that 
hundreds of recorded and reported cases, studied particu- 
larly with reference to modes of death and the sensation of 
dying, have satisfied medical science that the educated man 
at least dies usually "wondering, but uncertain, generally 



38 Buchanan's administration 

unconscious and unconcerned;" and that the Preacher was 
right: "As the one dieth so dieth the other." And yet, 
somehow, fanciful as it may be, I like to think that the 
righteous man will realize the confidence of the Psalmist, 
"I will lay me down in peace." 

From the time he left the presidency, Mr. Buchanan 
lived here among us. Many of the people of this town 
were no kinder to him than the historians have been, and 
quite as unjust. He outlived the storm of war, but while 
it raged, no unpatriotic sentiment ever fell from his lips or 
pen. In the fall of 1861, he wrote a public letter, appealing 
to a "loyal and powerful people" to sustain "a war made 
inevitable by the Confederate assault," calling for "brave 
and patriotic volunteers," and declaring that it was no 
time for peace propositions, but only for "prompt, ener- 
getic and united action" to support the president "with all 
the men and the means at the command of the country 
in a vigorous and successful prosecution of the war." He 
maintained that attitude until it ended. During its contin- 
uance, lest the publication might embarrass his successors, 
he withheld the defense and vindication which he was eager 
to print in 1861. 

The progress of events and the revolutionary changes 
they wrought in our governmental system, if they inspired 
no public regrets, certainly suggested to him no private 
remorse. October 21, 1865, he writes: 

"I pursued a settled, consistent line of policy from the 
beginning to the end, and, on reviewing my past conduct, 
I do not recollect a single important measure which I should 
desire to recall, even it this were in my power. Under this 
conviction, I have enjoyed a tranquil and cheerful mind, 
notwithstanding the abuse I have received, in full confi- 
dence that my countrymen would eventually do justice." 



ON THE EVE OF THE REBELLION 39 

For this he may long wait; the judgment of his own con- 
science, I am sure, never tarried nor faltered. 

A DEVOUT MAN.* 

Mr. Buchanan, from his youth up, was a devout man. 
Born of positively pious parentage, the Scriptures were his 
"horn-book" and private prayer his daily habit. One of 
his most contemptuous — I almost wrote contemptible — 
critics flippantly complains that he once asked for time 
to take with him, to closet conference with his God, a vex- 
atious pubUc question. His fastidious horror of being 
made conspicuous long withheld him from making open 
profession of his faith. The late Rev. Dr. John W. Nevin 
was his spiritual adviser; they had long and solemn confer- 
ences on theology. Dr. Nevin says "horse vespertinse" 
they might be called — held, as they were mostly, in the 
autumnal twilight, on, what seemed to be for both engaged 
in them, "the utmost verge of time." His spiritual adviser 
has recorded that Mr. Buchanan " felt himself to be on the 
borders of the eternal world, and was fully awake to the 
dread issues of the life to come. But with all this, his spirit 
abode in quiet confidence and peace, and the ground of his 
trust throughout was the mercy of God through the right- 
eousness of Jesus Christ. There was nothing like enthusi- 
asm, of course, in his experience; the general nature of the 
man made that impossible. His religion showed itself 
rather in the form of fixed trust in God, thankfulness for 
His past mercy and general resignation to His holy will." 
Dr. Nevin's own counsel influenced his determination to 
associate with the Church of his ancestors. 

In the early forenoon of a September Sabbath, 1865, in 



♦Adapted from "A Pennsylvania Presbyterian President," by the Author, 
Lancaster, Pa., 1907. 



40 Buchanan's administration 

the rather gloomy basement of the Presbyterian Church, 
in Lancaster, five persons only being present, this singularly 
pure-minded man — now old and "broken with the storms 
of state" — with a career behind him such as none in the 
city of his home has ever had before or since, came, even as 
a little child, and the modest minute of the proceedings 
runs thus: 

"Hon. James Buchanan, after being examined on his 
experimental evidence of piety, was admitted to the Com- 
munion and fellowship of this Church." 

An hour later, the same Lord's Day, in the sight of a then 
not numerous congregation, he who had risen from the 
humble home at "Stony Batter" to the first seat in the 
land, who had shone resplendent at foreign courts and 
had stood unabashed in the presence of earthly monarchs, 
with bowed head and before all the people, answered the 
soul-searching questions in terms that sealed him to the 
church on earth. 

As he received from the sanctified hands of his humble 
townsman that first communion of the broken and bleeding 
elements, I doubt not that he, far more than any else of 
them, recognized and realized that no principle of consti- 
tutional government he had ever argued, as counsellor or 
Congressman, was so vital as the question he then decided. 
No pageant he had ever witnessed as ambassador was so 
splendid as that simple ritual. No treaty he had ever 
negotiated vv'as so far-reaching as that solemn compact 
with his Maker. No mandate he had ever issued as chief 
executive was so tremendous in its personal importance to 
him as the message he that day sent to the throne of the 
living God. 

For nearly three years he v/orshiped and communed in 
this church; and when the end came, he fell away into a 
gentle sleep, from which he barely woke to whisper the 



ON THE EVE OF THE REBELLION > 41 

short Christian pra5^er, "0! Lord, God Almighty, as Thou 
wilt." He had lived as a patriot should hve; and he died 
as a Christian statesman should die. 

"Altogether, it was a death-bed experience full of tran- 
quil light and peace, the calm evening sunset of a long life, 
which seemed to be itself but the brightening promise of a 
new and far better life beyond the grave." 

And so he "passed to where, beyond these voices, there 
is peace." 



Abraham Lincoln 

An Essay 

Read Before 

The Cliosophic Society, Lancaster, Pa., February 7, 1908 



By 
George W. Richards, D. D. 

PE0PE8S0R OP CHURCH HISTORY IN THE THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY 

OP THE REPORMED CHURCH IN THE UNITED STATES, 

AT LANCASTER, PA. 



"To link my name with something that will redound 
to the interesU of my fellow men. that is all I desire to 
live for." 



LANCASTER. PA. 
MCMVIII 



Abraham Lincoln 



The general familiarity with the subject, the massiveness 
of the material and the traditional time-limits of this occa- 
sion make difficult a comprehensive treatment of the life 
and work of America's great emancipator. It will be con- 
ceded, however, that a man assumes national proportions 
by virtue of the magnitude of the problem with which he 
wrestles, the quality of character which he develops and 
the service which he renders his age. We shall, therefore, 
confine ourselves to a consideration of three points: the 
Problem, the Man and the Solution. 

L THE PROBLEM. 

The problem was no less a task than the preservation of 
the Union. It had world-wide bearings. It involved the 
destiny of the West. Democracy itself was hanging in the 
balances. The man who could quell an incipient rebellion, 
harmonize discordant elements, and " preserve, defend and 
protect the Government" would win for himself a perma- 
nent place among the immortals of history. 

The tendencies of disunion were found in the peculiar 
conditions of the colonial period. The thirteen colonies, 
which gradually crystallized out of the mass of pioneers 
on the Atlantic border, v/ere both divided and united by 
geographical, national, social and religious barriers and 
bonds. They were far enough apart to become, under cer- 



4 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 

tain circumstances, squabbling republics, after the manner 
of ancient Greece or mediaeval Italy. They were sufficiently 
attached to one another to become successively a League 
of Friendship, a Confederation of States and an organic 
and indissoluble Union. The realization of one or the other 
of these possibilities depended on the uncertain actions of men 
and on the logic of events. Men of keen insight into the 
history of nations and in close touch with their age, had 
decidedly adverse convictions about a union of the American 
colonies. Joseph Tucker, the Dean of Gloucester, said: 
" As to the future grandeur of America and its being a rising 
empire under one head, whether republican or monarchical, 
it is one of the idlest and most visionary notions that ever 
Avas conceived even by writers of romance. The natural 
antipathies and clashing interests of the Americans, their 
difference of government, habitudes and manners, indicate 
that they will have no center of union and no common in- 
terests." Frederick the Great agreed with the English 
Dean, and argued that the mere extent of the country, 
from Maine to Georgia, would suffice, either to break up the 
Union or to make a monarchy necessary. Washington 
himself was disturbed by these prophecies of evil, and 
secretly had his misgivings. It is clear that at best a union 
of states had to be effected by a process of growth rather 
than by a political fiat. 

A brief survey of the territory and of the genius of the 
colonies brings to light the centrifugal and centripetal 
factors and forces. The variety of climate and soil, the 
irregularities in the coast line, the slope of the mountains 
and the course of the rivers were a natural basis for the 
sections known as the New England, Middle and Southern 
States, with the differentiated life and interests of their 
inhabitants. The diversity of social and religious tenden- 
cies appears in the constituent nationalities and creeds. 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 5 

The Latin, Celt and Teuton contributed their portions to the 
embryonic nation. The dominant element was English, 
strongly influenced by a vigorous minority of Scotch-Irish, 
Dutch, Swedes, Germans, French and Swiss. They repre- 
sented every type of modern Christianity — the Pilgrim and 
the Puritan, the Anglican and the Catholic, the Baptist and 
the Quaker, the Lutheran and the Reformed, the Moravian 
and the Methodist. In those days national and religious 
distinctions were taken far more seriously than at present. 
They provoked antagonisms which not infrequently re- 
sulted in violence and blood. The selectmen of Boston 
ordered the Scotch-Irish to leave the tov/n. The Quakers 
regarded with suspicion a people who turned to the Book 
of Joshua for an Indian policy. The Germans were treated 
with contempt by the English. Free Massachusetts pointed 
the finger of scorn at slave-holding South Carolina. So 
different was the social and political organization of the 
colonies, that a stiff and stubborn pride in their respective 
institutions became an impassable wall of separation. The 
people were jealous of their territorial rights. Bitter feuds 
sprang up on account of boundary lines. The difficulties 
of travel, the lack of a common literature, the isolation of 
communities thinly scattered from Maine to Georgia, lent 
themselves to the petty and contemptible antipathies of 
the early settlers. 

In spite of these differences, there were points of contact 
and bonds of fellowship which held the colonies together. 
The territory which divided, also united, them. The racial 
unity was stronger than national diversity. The religious 
differences were surface lines. Unity of faith and purpose 
was found in the center and depth of the American churches. 
The hardships of a wilderness, the necessities of life, the 
presence of a common foe prowling in the forests, the recog- 
nition of the authority of a mother country, the spread of 



b ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 

the Great Awakening, the rise of eminent native Americans 
who belonged to no colony and were the pride of all, the 
general uprising against foreign oppression, fostered the 
spirit of unity or "the will-to-be-one" in the people. 

Still the creation of an indissoluble union from a chaos 
of colonies was the task of a centuiy. In their groping 
after federation, before the Revolution of 76, the colonies 
at most yielded only what was absolutely necessary for 
cooperation. Every suggestion of a complete fusion was 
rejected with decisive and ever-increasing emphasis. The 
individualism, which developed in the clearing of forests, 
the breaking of ground, and the building of towns, was 
naturally suspicious of a central government. This spirit 
of independence was equally strong in Rhode Island and in 
Virginia, in men like Samuel Adams and Richard Henry 
Lee. Even after the Revolution the continuance of the 
Confederation seemed by no means assured. The Consti- 
tutional Convention of 1787 was confronted by almost in- 
superable obstacles. It v/as divided into a number of 
parties. Some were made up of individuals, others of 
States. Some wanted a federal government much like the 
one they had during the war; others did not want a con- 
federacy at all. Some stood for a strong central authority, 
and others guarded the sovereignty of the state. The 
Southern States were against the Northern, the commercial 
States against the agricultural, the great States against the 
small. To meet the difficulties, three different constitu- 
tional drafts were submitted. The first is known as the 
Virginia plan, by Randolph ; the second, the South Carolina 
plan, by Charles Pinckney; and the third, the New Jersey 
plan, by Patterson. In the course of the debate feeling ran 
high and threats of leaving the convention were frequent. 
Some of the delegates went home in disgust and others 
offered concessions in vain. A constitution could be adopted 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 7 

only by the policy of compromise. The little States allowed 
proportional representation to the great States. The free 
States gave representation to the negro in the slave State, 
counting a negro three-fifths of a white man. The agricul- 
tural and commercial States were conciliated by mutually 
satisfactory regulations of the slave trade and of commerce. 

The ratification by the States was delayed by lukewarm- 
ness and stubborn resistance. Malcontents held popular 
meetings and stirred up disaffection and strife. North 
Carolina held out against the Constitution for two years, 
and Rhode Island had to be coerced into submission by 
threats. Two political parties arose, the Federalists and 
the Anti-Federalists, each one standing for a definite con- 
ception of the authority of the central government over 
the States. The Union Avas thus created but not completed. 
The policy of compromise concealed for a time the tension 
between its several sections, but compromise did not solve 
the latent difficulties. The question which disturbed na- 
tional politics for generations to come was that of State 
Rights. Was the new instrument of government a Con- 
stitution of the United States or of the States united? 
Upon the answer to this question depends the right of 
nullification or of secession when States are dissatisfied 
with an act of the national government, or the right of the 
government to coerce rebellious States into submission to 
the Union. At the opening of the nineteenth century few 
statesmen, North or South, would have been bold enough to 
have gainsaid the prerogative of a State to secede. A half 
a century later the scales turned and secession was consid- 
ered a crime against the Constitution. 

The occasion for the assertion of the doctrine of State 
Rights came more than once in the early history of the 
Republic. When the Alien and Sedition Laws were passed 
the Legislatures of Virginia and Kentucky officially pro- 



8 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 

claimed this prerogative. It was not a theory confined to the 
South alone. It was held by all the States and was affirmed 
without reserve when the well-being of one or more was 
imperilled. With the success of the Anti-Federalists, in 
1801, the struggle with England seriously embarrassed the 
industrial interests of the North, especially of New England. 
Then the Federalists became champions of State Rights 
and put into their political platforms the identical resolu- 
tions of Virginia and Kentucky. 

But the great cause for division was temporarily veiled 
by circumlocutory phrases in the Constitution itself. It 
was the special interest of the slave holders in the Southern 
States. Slavery furnished the motive for the logical de- 
velopment of state sovereignty and for the translation of 
the theory into practice. There was historical philosophy 
as well as popular poetry in the third stanza of Whittier's 
Battle Hymn: 

"What gives the wheat field blades of steel? 
What points the rebel cannon? 
What sets the grinding rabble's heel 
On the old star spangled pennon? 
What breaks the oath of the men of the South? 
What whets the knife of the Union's life? 
Hark to the answer, Slavery!" 

Lincoln, in his first inaugural, reiterates this sentiment 
in plain prose : " One section of our country believes slavery 
is right and ought to be extended, while the other believes 
it wrong, and ought not to be extended — the only substan- 
tial dispute." 

Two aspects of the question of slavery must be consid- 
ered for the imderstanding of its full significance. The first 
is its introduction, location and firm hold on a portion of 
our territory. The second is the rise and spread of anti- 
slavery sentiment, with its various shades of view and its 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 



divers forms of organization. When the Dutch man-of-war 
sailed into the harbor of Jamestown, in 1619, with twenty 
African slaves on board, there appeared a cloud on the 
American horizon not bigger than a man's hand but por- 
tending an inevitable storm. Slavery was then a fact and 
a force in the New World. The apple of discord was cast. 
The institution spread rapidly over the South. The climate, 
soil, plantations, and social ideals favored its growth. The 
geographical, social and religious conditions of the Middle 
and Northern States were, to say the least, not conducive 
to its perpetuity. The Western pioneers, largely under the 
influence of Northern ideas, were averse to it and did not 
find it profitable. To summarize: the power of custom, the 
grip of an inherited social order, the invention of the cotton 
gin, the deep-rooted pride of the Southern aristocracy, 
which could brook no opposition and resented every form 
of dictation, the stinging moral censures of Northern abo- 
litionists, and the pecuniary advantages accruing from 
slavery united in making it an indispensable necessity to 
the Southern man. 

In colonial days slavery was not justified on moral 
grounds. The institution was regarded unmoral and in- 
human. Men of the North and the South spoke against 
the iniquitous practice. In 1700 Judge Samuel Sewall 
issued the first public denunciation of slavery in a pamphlet. 
In 1688 the Mennonites of Germantown drew up the first 
petition against it. George Mason of Virginia said: "Slav- 
ery discourages arts and manufactures." Thomas Jeffer- 
son, in the original draft of the Declaration of Independence, 
made it one of the chief articles of indictment against 
George III., that he "prostituted his negative for suppress- 
ing every legitimate attempt to prohibit or to restrain this 
execrable traffic." In 1787 he wrote: "Indeed, I tremble 
for my country when I reflect that God is just and that His 
justice cannot sleep forever." 



10 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 

At the close of the eighteenth century, all the States 
north of Maryland had put slavery out of existence. After 
the national government was organized numerous petitions 
were submitted to Congress seeking its restriction or aboli- 
tion. Congress, however, declared that it had no power 
to interfere with slavery or the treatment of slaves within 
the States. The war of pamphlets began. With the open- 
ing of the nineteenth century, all the paraphernalia of the 
later anti-slavery movement were in use — societies, peti- 
tions, laws, and deliberate violations of laws. The abo- 
lition sentiment was nurtured and spread by ceaseless 
agitation. At first it divided the South against itself, and 
the North against itself. Then South and North were 
divided against each other. Old parties were split and 
new parties were formed. This process of division, segre- 
gation and consolidation is clearly discernible in the salient 
acts and movements of the nation from the Revolution to 
the Rebellion. 

The admission of new States into the Union intensified 
sectional feeling. The South realized that the maintenance 
of the balance of power in Congress was the safeguard of 
slavery. Its perpetuity depended on its extension into 
new territory. The creation of States out of the vast 
region beyond the Mississippi was bound to disturb the 
time-honored equilibrium. The Missouri Compromise was 
a temporary political armistice, but agitation against 
slavery could not be restrained by statutes. Public senti- 
ment eludes and laughs at legislatures. The American 
Colonization Society of 1816 and the American Anti-Slavery 
Society of 1833 were well-meant palliatives but not cures 
for the disease. Garrison took the advanced ground of 
immediate abolition throughout the United States, because 
slavery was morally wrong and, therefore, ought not to be 
tolerated anywhere. The ethical aspect of the question 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 11 

appealed more and more to the people. Feeling became so 
intense on both sides, North and South, that threats of 
secession were heard in Massachusetts as well as in South 
Carolina. When, in 1845, Garrison proposed that New 
England should withdraw from the Union unless slavery 
was abolished, he was applauded to the echo. Calhoun 
demanded that the balance of power must be restored in 
the House or the Union must be dissolved. The political 
heroes of a passing era once more came from retirement to 
guide the storm-tossed Ship of State and pour the oil of 
compromise on the angry sea. They cried, "peace," but 
there was no peace. Seward, Sumner and Chase struck a 
new note and heralded the dawn of a new period. The 
"irrepressible conflict" was at hand. Free-soil Whigs and 
free-soil Democrats organized and acted with grim deter- 
mination. The deceptive peac^e of the compromise of 1850 
was rudely disturbed by a quick succession of significant 
events — the announcement of the doctrine of Popular 
Sovereignty, the Dred Scott Decision, the Lecompten Con- 
stitution, John Brown's Raid and the election of the Repub- 
lican candidate for the presidency, Abraham Lincoln. 

The exigencies of the hour, no less than the gradual con- 
summation of a political and moral process, required the 
pursuance of a new policy in the treatment of the central 
national question. The Union was created and preserved 
up to this time by compromise. Never was there an ordi- 
nance passed, from 1787 to 1850, v/hich squarely faced the 
issue and consistently expressed the convictions, either of 
the pro-slavery or of the anti-slavery men. Circumspect 
statesmen felt it their paramount mission to maintain at 
any cost cordial relations between the North and the South. 
But under the cover of expediency there grew up individu- 
als and societies who represented logical and ethical con- 
sistency. They spoke in unvarnished terms and blew a 



12 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 

trumpet of no uncertain sound. On the one side, it must be 
abolition or war; on the other, slavery or secession. The 
champion of uncalculating consistency, who rose above the 
puritanical radicalism and political moderatism of the 
North as well as the aristocratic pride and sectional arro- 
gance of the South and represented no single party but stood 
for all the people, came from the fresh, vigorous, homely 
and untutored West. The prophet of the new order an- 
nounced his message in the Springfield, 111., Convention of 
1858, Yv'hen he said : " A house divided against itself cannot 
stand. I believe this government cannot endure perma- 
nently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union 
to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I 
do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all 
one thing, or all the other." When Lincoln read these 
words to a coterie of advisers before he spoke them on the 
following day, they were thrown into consternation. De- 
feat was sure to follow such an untimely and immoderate 
utterance. But he calmly replied: "I should rather be 
defeated with this expression in the speech than be vic- 
torious without it." He lost the senatorship but he gained 
the presidency. The man of the hour had come into 
national politics. 

Let us briefly summarize the results of history. They, 
indeed, fail to comprehend the gravity of the situation which 
confronted Buchanan and Lincoln whose vision is limited 
by the sixth decade of the century, and who contend that 
the problem could have been solved by a single decisive 
stroke. The controversy, which threatened to drench the 
land with fraternal blood, was the outcome of economic and 
moral })rocesses extending over more than a century. For 
a time the different sections of the new Republic felt the 
pulses of growth and expansion and were bound together 
by the enthusiasm of youth and the sense of a community 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 



nf interests The political honors were being equitably 
Itlutt^between'the North and the ^o^^^^^^^^^^^^^ 
in,, statesmen who p anned nominations and directea eiec 
tifnfby cicis and correspondence. The Southern s tates- 
rlen in the beginning were warm supporters o( national 
rxnansiora moderat^ tariff, and a diversification of indus- 
trtes But in the course of a few decades they discovered 
to their sorrow that they were the heirs of a social system 
wh ch bar ed them from the great change and growth 
:h ch shaped the rising nation. The South foo^J^"^^ 
fixed order. It passionately resisted change. Slavery s» 
crvstall zed the classes and the customs of the South, that 
it was wholly incapable of adjusting itself to the mdustria 
revoMfon which was transforming and unifying the East 
and th West. The population of the country grew, in the 
decade from 1830 to 1840, from thirteen to seventeen m.l- 
Uons and the immigration trebled. But the population of 
the South increased scarcely at all. The winmug of the 
West changed the aspect of tlie national question. From 
Us borders' came the Jacksonian Democracy protestag 
alinst the traditional rule of an aristocracy of New Eng 
knders and Southerners. Coming to a consciousness of 
fown resources, the West felt that in "s ^-ds was^^th^^^ 
balance of power in national elections. The t ree souers 
and the Anti-slavery men multiplied - geometrical pro^ 
tression The Mississippi Valley was rapidly fi led up with 
StSrTand enriched by the products of a fertde soil and a 
variety of industries which sprang up in a night. In these 
regions slavery had a precarious existence. Even the 

Se SoXr'ner, coming "^*°.*« ^^f.^VrKvC 
up his social and political traditions, I'beratedh.s slaves, 
and was absorbed by the new environment ^J^!^^^^^ 
ktic and irreconcilable forms of pohtical life gradually grew 
up under the protection of one constitution and government. 



14 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 

A house so divided against itself could not stand. The 
hidden dualism became the fontal source of secret prejudice 
and open conflict. Now it came to light in the nullification 
of tariff laws, and then in the threats of secession and in 
the war of the Rebellion. Time did not heal the breach. 
The tender offices of the greatest statesmen failed. The 
issues of the conflict became clearer and more difficult to 
settle. The hour arrived when an appeal had to be taken 
from the House, the Judiciary and the popular assembly 
to the field of battle, and judgment had to be written in 
blood. No iron- willed Jackson could have held in leash 
the Dogs of War, nor could legislative action have averted 
the terrific storm. %'-pi j 

IL THE MAN, 

P'lWe shall now consider the man into whose hands the 
government was entrusted. In response to a request for 
the facts of his early life, Mr. Lincoln replied: "It can aU 
be condensed into a single sentence and that sentence you 
will find in Gray's Elegy, 'The short and simple annals of 
the poor.'" The line of his paternal ancestors extends 
from Kentucky through Virginia, Pennsylvania, New Eng- 
land, to Norfolk county, England. Quaker and Puritan 
blood flowed in his veins, a fact which his father, Thomas, 
indignantly resented. For six generations the Lincolns 
were pioneers in the settlement of new countries. They 
shared the fortunes and misfortunes of the wilderness. 
His mother, Nancy Hanks, was the natural child of a Vir- 
ginia planter, a woman of strong mind whose memory her 
son loved to honor. To her he traced whatever mental 
power he inherited. His father was shiftless and ignorant. 
He usually failed where everybody succeeded. True to 
the migratory instinct of his tribe, he moved successively 
from Kentucky to Indiana and from Indiana to Illinois, 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 15 

seeking rest and finding none. When the family reached 
the banks of the Sangammon, Abraham had passed his 
twenty-first birthday. 

His scholastic education was limited to four months of 
instruction by unlettered masters in log school houses. 
Though he was not taught in the schools, he nevertheless 
learned letters. His thirst for knowledge was irrepressible. 
Neither his poverty nor his illiterate surroundings could 
prevent his mental gro^^i-h. His library consisted chiefly 
of borrowed books, and their number is easily told. His 
biographers find traces in his youth of ^sop's Fables, Rob- 
inson Crusoe, Pilgrim's Progress, a history of the United 
States, two lives of Washington (the one by Weems, the 
other by Ramsay), the Lives of Clay and of Franklin and a 
copy of Shakespeare's Plays and of Burns' Poems. He 
knew his Bible well and in early manhood mastered Euclid. 
He was an intensive rather than extensive reader, a man 
of one book. His mathematical problems and his early 
compositions he inscribed on a wooden shovel by the hearth, 
and shaved off the scrawls with a draw-knife to repeat the 
performance. At an early age he wrote verse and satirical 
prose, but the productions were coarse and " too indecent 
for publication." 

He was trained chiefly in the rough surroundings of the 
frontier community. From childhood he was compelled to 
struggle for life. He was never industrious and the neigh- 
bors called him lazy. He took delight in lounging, telling 
stories, talking politics, reading books, attending parties 
and making speeches. He changed his occupation fre- 
quently. He did the odd jobs that came his way: slaught- 
ered hogs at thirty-one cents a day, cleared forests, split 
rails, conducted a flat boat to New Orleans, managed a 
store, acted as postmaster, commanded a company of sol- 
diers, was assistant surveyor and served in the State Legis- 



16 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 

lature. After his admission to the bar at Springfield he 
won an enviable reputation as a lawyer, but he loved poli- 
tics better than law. He stumped the state for Harrison 
and Tyler, debated with Douglas and was elected to Con- 
gress in 1846. These are the salient facts of his life before 
he became a presidential possibility. 

By nature and training he had great physical strength 
and endurance. He was tall, six feet three and one-half 
inches in His stockings, brawny, large-boned and awkward, 
"the largest and strongest of them all." The prodigious 
feats which legend ascribes to him would adorn the histories 
of Samson and Milo. He never lost his almost childlike 
pride in the height of his stature. Mr. Sherman relates, in 
his Memoirs, how he first met Mr. Lincoln the evening after 
his arrival in Washington, in 1861. "When introduced to 
him," says Mr. Sherman, "he took my hands in both of 
his, drew himself up to his full height and looking at me 
steadily, said: 'You're John Sherman. Well, I'm taller 
than you. Let's measure.' Thereupon we stood back to 
back and someone present announced that he was two 
inches taller than I. This was correct." He could not 
well conceal his contempt for short men. When he met 
the undersized Verraonter, Douglas, in 1844, he sneeringly 
said he was the "least man" he had ever seen. He broke 
the solemnity of the Hampton Roads Conference by passing 
a comment on the size of Alexander Stephens. The little 
Southern commissioner, eighty pounds in weight, protected 
his frail body against the mid-winter cold with a profusion 
of overcoats and wraps. In the warm cabin of the steamer 
River Queen he pulled off layer after layer. When he 
finally emerged, Lincoln said, in an undertone, to the 
Secretary of State: "Seward, that is the largest shucking 
for so small a nubbin that I ever saw." The time came 
when his gigantic body served him in good stead for bearing 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 17 

the bui'dens of a distracted nation, which rested so heavily 
upon him. 

Intellectually and morally he showed no evidence of ex- 
traordinary genius; still he cultivated the basal virtues of 
true manhood. He was honest, sober, sympathetic, thought- 
ful, generous and soundly ambitious. In each stage of his 
life he showed capacity for leadership and proved himself 
master of his environment. He was in a measure the 
creature of circumstances, but he was far more the creator 
of new conditions. He kept in close touch with the people 
en masse. First, with the villagers in the frontiers; then, 
the citizens of Illinois; and finally, the nation itself. He 
passed in his lifetime through all the grades of American 
civilization— from the open-faced cabin to the cottage, 
from the cottage to the mansion ; from homespun to broad- 
cloth, from the grocery store to the Legislature, from the 
debating society to the political platform, from the bar to 
the White House. He became, in a sense, the first typical 
American, a child of the West. His strength increased with 
the magnitude of the task which was before him. His latent 
capacity seemed inexhaustible. He was not a scholar, but 
he had wisdom. He lacked the graces of polite society, 
but he was a gentleman. He was genial, affable and 
jovial; still he was reserved, cautious and secretive — "a 
sceptered hermit, wrapped in the solitude of his own origi- 
nality." He was guileless in exterior habit; still he was 
sagacious and diplomatic. He was deferential and ever 
ready to listen and to learn, but formed his own conclu- 
sions and was immovable after he reached a decision. In 
finance he failed and in love he hardly succeeded. In 
maturer years he developed an unusual power for the 
analysis and penetration of a subject. He grasped the 
core of an argument and stated it concisely and clearly. 
Mr. Whitney says: "In clearness and facility of statement 



18 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 

he was like Webster or Jefferson; in remorseless logic, like 
Calhoun or John Quincy Adams; in fiery and impetuous 
denunciation, like Clay or Blaine; yet he excelled them all 
in simplicity and terseness." 

He leaned by nature toward the true and the good. He 
was an Israelite without guile. He i-evolted from cruelty 
and craft. He never drank liquor nor smoked tobacco. 
His temperance speeches are still on record. He was the 
defender of the abused and the distressed. He was a poor 
advocate of a bad cause. He keenly felt the injustice of 
slavery. While he was in New Orleans, he witnessed the 
sale of a mulatto girl. He remarked to a friend by his side: 
" If I ever get a chance to hit that thing, I'll hit it hard." 
His highest ambition, to quote his own language, was " to 
connect my name with the events of my day and generation, 
and so impress myself upon them as to link my name with 
something that will redound to the interests of my fellow- 
men. That is all I desire to live for." 

He was an apostle of the " square deal" and " of fair play." 
He did the right as he saw the right. His vision was not al- 
ways clear, but his purpose was good. The secret of his life 
is found in the homely title which the townsmen of New 
Salem gave him in his youth — "honest Abe." He was 
forever honest, whether he clerked in a store, wrestled in 
the ring, argued with Douglas, or administered the affairs 
of a nation. Neither friend nor foe questioned his sincerity. 
True, Douglas was more brilliant as an orator, but when he 
sat down, men said, "is he honest?" When Lincoln fin- 
ished his argument, men cried, "he is honest!" That con- 
viction grew upon his countrymen, exalted him to the 
highest office in the gift of the nation, and won for him the 
affection of a distressed and scattered people in the darkest 
days of the Republic. He never lost faith in the people. 
Mr. Bancroft says: " As a child, in a dark night, on a rugged 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 19 

way, clutches hold of the hand of its father for guidance 
and support, he clung fast to the hand of the people and 
moved calmly through the gloom." Such mutual confidence 
of leader and followers inspireei and throbbed in the na- 
tional slogan, "We are coming. Father Abraham, three 
himdred thousand strong!" 

Lincoln was never a churchman. In his youth he was 
tainted with skepticism. At the age of twenty-five he 
wrote an extended essay against Christianity with a view 
to its publication. He was then under the influence of 
Thomas Paine. A friend, who acted more wisely than he 
knew, took the manuscript from the author's hand and 
cast it into the fire. There was a time when he doubted the 
inspiration of the Bible and the divinity of Christ. When 
his intermittent spells of melancholy settled upon him and 
wrapped him in impenetrable gloom, he questioned even 
the existence of a personal God and of a future life. But 
he was always serious, reverent and tolerant. He highly 
respected the religious convictions of others. Tertullian 
would have classed him with those who are "naturally 
Christian." His pubhc writings, addresses, and state 
papers not only sparkle with scriptural allusions, but reveal 
a marked change, in mature manhood, in his attitude to- 
ward eternal realities. He then had firm faith in God, in 
Providence, in a moral order, in prayer and in the ultimate 
victory of truth and righteousness. In his letter of accept- 
ance of the first presidential nomination, he implores the 
"assistance of Divine Providence." In his inaugural ad- 
dresses, in his messages to Congress and in his proclama- 
tions of national thanksgivings, times without number he 
recognizes the power, the wisdom, the mercy and the jus- 
tice of God. A man of his breadth of sincerity, however, 
was naturally repelled by the sectarianism and bigotry 
which aflflicted the churches of his day. He once said: 



20 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 

"When any church will inscribe over its altar as its own 
qualification for membership, the Saviour's condensed 
statement of the substance of both law and gospel, 'Thou 
shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all 
thy soul and with all thy mind, and thy neighbor as thy- 
self,' that church will I join with all my heart and all my 
soul." 

Until 1856, when Lincoln was forty-seven years of age, 
neither his personal attainments nor his official position 
indicated the necessary qualifications for national leader- 
ship. He was a lawyer, indeed, of more than local repute. 
He had won fame as a stump speaker and political debater. 
In his single term in Congress he never rose above a respect- 
able mediocrity. When the Republican party was organ- 
ized, in 1856, he lived in comparative obscurity and was 
overshadowed by men whose names were household words 
from coast to coast — Seward and Sumner, Fremont and 
Chase, Banks and Bissell. But in the Bloomington Con- 
vention he sprang into unexpected prominence and hence- 
forth moved with rapid strides toward the high goal. He 
outdid the great Nebraskan Commoner himself by deliver- 
ing a speech which held his hearers in breathless attention 
and inspired enthusiasm which found vent in exclamations, 
cheers and applause. Reporters dropped their pencils and 
forgot their note-books, but the sentiments which he uttered 
never perished from the memory of his audience. Illinois 
awakened to the fact that it had reared a big giant as well 
as a "little giant." The latent powers of Lincoln's mind 
were aroused to action and his face was set toward Wash- 
ington. The newspapers announced him as a presidential 
possibility. At the Philadelphia Convention in June he 
polled 110 votes as a nominee for the vice-presidency. He 
was then chosen by the Republicans of his state as the 
most formidable candidate for the United States senator- 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 21 

ship against the Star of the Democracy, Stephen A. Douglas. 
In seven joint debates Lincoln proved himself a master of 
the Constitution, a safe exponent of Republicanism, and a 
foeman worthy of the steel of the most brilliant statesman 
of the West, if not of the country. Without Douglas, Lin- 
coln might have died unhonored and unsung. The "little 
giant" became a stepping stone to higher things; for, while 
he was arguing with Douglas before the people of Illinois, 
he was, in his own words, "playing for larger game." He 
made statements which at the time the public was not 
ready to receive. Douglas was elected to the senatorship, 
but Lincoln advanced a step toward the White House. 

He had now become sufficiently great to attract the 
attention of the Young Men's Republican Association of 
Brooklyn, which invited him to deliver an address in Plym- 
outh Church. The coveted, and still dreaded, privilege of 
standing before a metropolitan audience had come. He 
delivered his famous Cooper-Union speech. Notwithstand- 
ing his brand new suit of ready-made clothes, with panta- 
loons and coat sleeves cut too short and wrinkled and 
creased by several days' pressure in a handbag, Lincoln 
captivated the social and political lions of the metropolis. 
The aftermath in the Athenaeum Club is described as fol- 
lows: "Lincoln was the hero of the hour. There was no 
formality, but there was indeed 'a feast of reason and a 
flow of soul,' which lasted till the 'wee sma' hours.' Mr. 
Lincoln was perfectly at home. He 'tauld his queerest 
stories,' and the solemn walls of the club had never echoed 
to such hilarity. When the party broke up and tAvo gentle- 
men escorted Lincoln to the Astor House, everyone was 
pleased with himself and with all mankind." He made a 
torn' through New England and won the admiration of the 
fastidious East. The Professor of Rhetoric of Yale College 
heard his speech at New Haven and analyzed its fine rhetoric 
and powerful logic before his class the next day. 



22 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 

When the Chicago Convention met, Lincoln was no 
longer a dark horse but a candidate who loomed up so 
prominently that Seward might well fear him above every 
other rival. All the political machinery of such occasions 
was set in motion and his nomination was achieved not 
" without adroit and astute political skill and management." 
On the third ballot the long cherished presidential aspira- 
tions of the idol of the Empire State were blasted, and by 
formal motion of Mr. Evarts, Abraham Lincoln was unani- 
mously nominated for the presidency of the United States 
by the Republican party. 

In the election of November 6, 1860, the people ratified 
the choice of the Chicago Convention, and on December 
5th, 180 electoral votes for Lincoln gave him a majority of 
57 votes over Breckenridge, Bell and Douglas. 

It was one thing, however, to carry a popular election 
and win the presidency; another thing to reconcile and 
reward his rivals; to crystallize the strength of the loyal 
States, to suppress an unprecedented secession which was 
rapidly sweeping the nation into war, and to steer clear of 
the enthusiasm of friends and the apathy of foes. The 
wisdom of his election had to be vindicated by the achieve- 
ments of his administration. 

IIL THE SOLUTION. 

Never did a president take the oath of office with greater 
difficulties before him, and with less means at his command 
to cope with them. Six States were in open secession, 
taking steps to organize an independent confederacy and 
gathering their forces for war. His predecessor, rightly or 
wrongly, was charged with indecision and treasonable sym, 
pathy with the Southern conspirators. The president- 
himself, was not an experienced statesman and lacked the 
confidence of even the Republican leaders. The four par- 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 23 

ties in the campaign had spread the spirit of division over 
the land and increased sectional jealousy and dissension. 
The people, in the enjoyment of long years of peace, had 
forgotten the arts of war. From an empty treasury re- 
sources were to be drawn beyond precedent in the history 
of finance. The trees were still in the forests and the iron 
in the earth with which a navy was to be built. The regu- 
lar army v/as a mere handful of men stationed on the fron- 
tiers. Experienced conmianders deserted to the Southern 
cause, and undisciplined officers were to transform a mob 
into an army in a month. The public opinion of Europe 
was skeptical or hostile. The North was honeycombed 
with secessionists as the South was with Unionists. The 
Ship of State was drifting, and, like Cardinal Newman, 
when he was fog-bound on the Mediterranean, men looked 

for the 

"Kindly Light amid the encircling gloom." 

The question was, not how to make war, but how to preserve 
peace. It was not a time for precipitate action, but for 
cautious deliberation and patient forbearance. The par- 
tisan, wise fifty years after the event, complacently outlines 
an invincible policy and in the solitude of his comfortable 
library, with the ringlets of a delicious Havana circling 
peacably above his head, puts his foot on the viper of 
secession, turns on his heel, and lo! the rebellion is crushed 
and the Union saved forever. "Was not the South in se- 
cession?" he cries. "Did not the governors of the 
seceded States send military forces to demand the surrender 
of the feebly-garrisoned federal forts v;ithin their domains? 
Did they not take possession of arsenals, custom houses, 
mints and other public buildings and property of the 
United States?" History answers "yes." But neither the 
North nor the South was prepared for a declaration of war 
before every expedient of peace was exhausted. So long 



24 ABRAHAM LINCOLN, 

had Southern threats of disunion served as a party menace, 
that they ceased to terrify the North. Even the recent 
more formal poHcies of Southern legislatures and conven- 
tions appeared as spectacular manifestations to extort 
compromise and concession from Northern voters. The 
people of both sides not only hoped, but believed, that 
again, as so often before, the quarrel could be allayed by 
compromise. To this end both the House and the Senate 
appointed committees to devise measures of reconciliation 
and peace. But the seven plans before the one, and the 
forty before the other failed to obtain the assent of the ma- 
jority. For the same purpose a peace convention, com- 
posed of delegates sent by the governors of fourteen States 
of the Union, sat in the city of Washington from February 
4th to February 27th, but the convention adjourned with- 
out reaching practicable conclusions. Chapters of history 
were made almost daily. The issue stood out in bolder 
relief and in sharper antithesis week after week. Southern 
senators and representatives gradually withdrew from their 
seats in Congress. The secessionists, on February 4th 
organized a provisional Congress; on February 8th formed 
a provisional government known as the Confederate States 
of America; and on March 11th adopted a permanent con- 
stitution. Men hoped against hope that peace might be 
restored, but their dearest hopes were blasted and their 
worst fears realized. 

At this juncture, neither Lincoln nor his advisors, either 
before or after the inauguration, could have had a clearly- 
defined and irreversible plan of action. The condition of 
affairs was too intricate and too greatly dependent upon 
incalculable and uncontrollable contingencies even for the 
most far-sighted statesman to have been able to move in 
a straight line and to see the end from the beginning. In 
the interim from his election to the bombardment of Fort 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 25 

Sumter, the attitude of Lincoln was one of prudent reserve. 
He was equally great in his determination to stand and 
wait and in his decision to advance and act. The spirit of 
his first inaugural is tolerant and irenic, yet firm and reso- 
lute. He assures "the Southern States that by the acces- 
sion of a Republican administration, their property and 
their peace and personal security are not to be endangered." 
He declares that he " has no purpose, directly or indirectly, 
to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States 
where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so 
and I have no inclination to do so." He reiterates the 
resolution of the Republican platform, "that the mainten- 
ance inviolate of the rights of the States, and especially 
the right of each State to order and control its own domestic 
institutions, according to its own judgment exclusively, 
is essential to that balance of power on which the perfection 
and endurance of our political fabric depend; and we de- 
nounce the lawless invasion of armed force of the soil of 
any State or Territory, no matter under what pretext, as 
among the gravest crimes." He emphatically affirms, how- 
ever, that " no State upon its own mere motion can lawfully 
get out of the Union," and announces in unmistakable 
language his purpose to preserve the Union intact. But he 
adds: "In doing this there must be no bloodshed and vio- 
lence, and there shall be none, unless it be forced upon the 
national authority." 

In the conclusion of his address he pleads for peace. 
" My countrymen, one and all, think calmly and well upon 
this whole subject. Nothing valuable can be lost by taking 
time. If it were admitted that you, who are dissatisfied, 
hold the right side in the dispute, there is no single good 
reason for precipitate action. Indulgence, patriotism, 
Christianity, and a firm reliance on Him who has never 
yet forsaken this favored land, are still competent to ad- 
just in the best way all our present difficulties." 



26 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 

Further quotations are unnecessary to show that Lin- 
coln did not breathe defiance or thrust the mailed fist into 
the faces of the secessionists. His purpose was to exhaust 
"all peaceable measures before a resort to any stronger 
ones." But he was, at the same time, irrevocably pledged 
"to hold, occupy and possess the property and places be- 
longing to the government, and to collect the duties and 
imposts." He solemnly declared "that to the extent of 
my ability, I shall take care, as the Constitution itself ex- 
pressly enjoins upon me, that the laws of the Union be 
faithfully executed in all the States." War or no war, 
these declarations could not be retracted. Men of the 
South, who heard the inaugural, caught its martial under- 
tone. On March 5th, Mr. L. Q. Washington wrote from 
the capital to the Confederate Secretary of War: "I was 
present last evening at a consultation of Southern gentle- 
men, at which Messrs. Crawford, Garnett, Pryor, De Jar- 
nette of Virginia, and Wigfall of Texas were present. We 
all put the same construction on the inaugural, which we 
carefully went over together. We agreed that it was Lin- 
coln's purpose at once to attempt the collection of the 
revenues, to reinforce and hold Fort Sumter and Pickens, 
and to retake the other places. He is a man of will and 
firmness." 

His deliberate action and the evidences of his independ- 
ent leadership appear in the conduct of the transactions 
relating to Fort Sumter. Major Anderson reported that 
his provisions would be exhausted in a few weeks, and re- 
quested a force of not less than 20,000 good and well- 
disciplined men to relieve him. Remembering that there 
were only 17,113 officers and men in the regular army and 
that these were scattered in small detachments along the 
western frontiers, it is clear that the request of Anderson 
could not be granted. The administration was in a sore 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 27 

dilemma. Lieutenant-General Scott, after consultation 
with the officers of the army and the navy, reported that 
"evacuation seems almost inevitable, and in this view our 
distinguished chief engineer concurs." The cabinet, with 
the exception of Postmaster-General Blair, agreed with the 
experts of the army. But after Lincoln's promise "to 
hold, occupy and possess the property and places belonging 
to the government," the abandonment of Sumter would 
be utterly ruinous. "At home it would discourage the 
friends of the Union, embolden its adversaries and go far 
to ensure to the latter recognition abroad," With a keen 
sense of his predicament, Lincoln said: "When Anderson 
goes out of Fort Sumter, I shall have to go out of the White 
House." Since reinforcement was an absolute impossibil- 
ity, the alternative of starving or withdrawal of the gar- 
rison presented itself. When the provisioning of Fort Sum- 
ter was proposed, only three of the cabinet were favorable. 
Seward was inflexible in his opposition. Lincoln, however, 
announced that "he must send bread to Anderson." In 
spite of positive protests from high authority, he ordered 
the despatch of a relief expedition, but not without due 
notice to the governor of South Carolina. The assurance 
wa? given that if the attempted relief would not be resisted, 
"no effort to throw in men, arms or ammunition" would be 
attempted until further notice or in case of attack. Even 
at this stage he did not play the aggressor toward the 
secessionists, but acted on the defensive. In his special 
message of July 4, 1861, he does not leave us in doubt on 
this point, when he tells us that he "sought only to hold 
the public places and property not already wrested from 
the government and to collect the revenues, relying for the 
rest on time, discussion and the ballot box." 

Far be it from us to presume to measure swords with the 
brilHant essayist of the last Cliosophic. He would be rash, 



28 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 

indeed, who would rush into the Hsts to try his strength 
with one whose blade is so keen and whose stroke so true. 
It is only as a victim of circumstances, from which we would 
fain run away, but by which we are inextricably entangled, 
that we venture to consider the relation between the policy 
of Buchanan and of Lincoln before the attack on Sumter. 
Who could fail to admire the chivalrous gallantry of our 
distinguished townsman when he cited the notable his- 
torians of America and found them arrayed against him 
like a wall of adamant? We have found, however, another 
son of Pennsylvania who has championed the cause of the 
ill-fated Buchanan. He was never in political sympathy 
with him, nor did any personal affection warp his judg- 
ment. Mr. A. K. McClure, thirty years after Buchanan's 
retirement, wrote: "It will surprise many at this day when 
I say that Abraham Lincoln took up the reins of govern- 
ment just where James Buchanan left them, and continued 
precisely the same policy toward the South that Buchanan 
had inaugurated, until the Southern leaders committed 
the suicidal act of firing on Fort Sumter." 

To do justice to this view we must not forget the epoch- 
making effect of the assault on Anderson. It clarified the 
vision of our statesmen and changed the whole problem in 
the North and the South. Then, too, a comparison between 
antipodal men like Buchanan and Lincoln is almost im- 
possible without doing injustice to both. Their parentage, 
early training, intellectual and social characteristics, politi- 
cal allegiance and official experience were as far apart as 
the East is from the West. In the critical period before the 
election and the inauguration of Lincoln days were years 
and months decades. No one can tell what Buchanan 
would have done two months later ; or Lincoln, three months 
earlier. The former, however, has put himself on record, 
in a letter to Mr. Baker, April 26, 1861, saying: "The 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 29 

attack on Fort Sumter was an outrageous act. The authori- 
ties of Charleston were several times warned by my admin- 
istration that such an attack would be civil war and would 
be treated as such. If it had been made in my time, it 
should have been treated as such." This ex post facto 
utterance is confirmed by his much condemned answer to 
the South Carolina commissioners. He declined to rein- 
force the forts in Charleston harbor, " relying on the honor 
of South Carolinians that they will not be assaulted while 
they remain in their present condition." He assumed, also, 
that he, as president, had no power to take action ; that the 
whole dispute was to be submitted to Congress. But he 
said in unequivocal language, "if South Carolina should 
take any of these forts, she will then become the assailant 
in war against the United States." 

The two presidents agreed in pursuing a policy intended 
to preserve peace rather than to precipitate war. On ac- 
count of the insufficiency of the army and navy, both 
considered an attempt to reinforce Fort Sumter futile. 
Lincoln, however, determined to jyrovision it. Both still 
believed that the Union could be preserved intact and the 
breach could be healed by peaceable measures. Both, 
accordingly, showed long-sufferance toward a rebellious 
people, which was born not of traitorous sympathy nor 
of cowardly indecision, but of a magnanimous determina- 
tion to save the South from the consequence of her blind 
folly, and the whole nation from the horrors of an interne- 
cine war. 

The truth of history and justice to two distinguished 
men require a statement not only of points of agreement, 
but, also, of points of difference. As men, they must be 
placed under two incomparable categories. Buchanan, 
leaving office, enfeebled by age and distracted by ruthless 
criticisms, belonged to a passing era. Lincoln, entering 



30 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 

ofRce in the matmity of manhood and borne up by tha^ 
enthusiasm of a party lately come into power, belonged to 
a new order. Buchanan was a loyal Democrat, Lincoln 
a Whig and a Republican. Buchanan not only stood for 
non-interference with slavery where it was, but for its 
right to go where it was not. Lincoln disclaimed any in- 
tention to abolish slavery, but he was unalterably opposed 
to its extension into new territory. Buchanan was in sym- 
pathy with the doctrine of State Rights, the Lecompton 
Constitution and the Dred Scott Decision. Lincoln won 
his presidential spurs in waging unremitting war against 
these measures. Buchanan was not an avowed opponent 
of slavery. Lincoln considered it a necessary evil and 
hoped for its extirpation. Buchanan was elected before 
secession by a solid South; Lincoln was elected by an 
almost solid North and inaugurated after secession. Buch- 
anan was the victim of a treacherous cabinet ; Lincoln chose 
his advisors in full view of the situation. Buchanan had 
to meet secession in its incipiency with a nation perplexed 
and dumfounded; Lincoln came into office after the Con- 
federate States had formed a provisional government and 
sentiment was rapidly crystallizing on both sides. Buch- 
anan received the South Carolina Commissioners and held 
that the initiative for the settlement of the trouble was 
vested m Congress and not in the executive. Lincoln, 
warned by Buchanan's experience, ignored the commis- 
sioners of the Confederacy and affirmed his right to defend 
and protect the government. Buchanan denied the right 
of states to secede, but also of the Federal government to 
coerce; Lincoln denied the right to secede and claimed the 
constitutional right to coerce. 

Long after these statements are torn to shreds in the 
disoaSiioQ of the coming hour, the question as to what 
both should have done will remain an insoluble crux for 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 31 

the statesmen, the military officers and the historians for 
generations to come. 

The second stage of Lincoln's administration opened 
with the firing on Fort Sumter — the shot which "echoed 
around the world" and "brought all the free States to their 
feet as one man." The time for patient forbearance and 
peaceable adjustment had expired. For Lincoln there 
could be but one policy, and that was the successful prose- 
cution and speedy termination of the war and the restora- 
tion 'of the Union. Happily for the unification of the 
North, he kept inviolate his promise to his dissatisfied 
countrymen in the inaugural, that "the government would 
not assail them, and that there could be no conflict v/ithout 
being themselves the aggressors." The secessionists, blind 
to their own interests, became the "assailants of the gov- 
ernment, and forced upon the country the distinct issues, 
* immediate dissolution or blood.'" In the words of Emer- 
son the attack on Fort Sumter "crystallized the North 
into a unit and the hope of mankind was saved." Party 
limits were abolished. Mr. Douglas, supported by a mil- 
lion voters, voluntarily intervievvred the president and 
pledged his support of the administration. Ancient feuds 
and bitter prejudices were forgotten under the impulse of 
a new enthusiasm and in the presence of a common danger. 

The declaration of war was attended by problems in- 
numerable. An empty treasury had to be replenished. 
Neither the army nor the navy was prepared for efficient 
service. New officers had to be appointed and stationed. 
The neutrality of foreign powers had to be maintained, if 
their sympathy could not be won. The border States had 
to be concilliated and kept loyal to the government. The 
depressing effects of disastrous defeats had to be counter- 
acted. The slow progress of the war chilled the first out- 
burst of enthusiasm and cries were heard from North and 



32 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 

South for a cessation of hostilities. The president was the 
target of caustic criticisms, from domineering and dis- 
affected members of his cabinet, arrogant miUtary officers, 
a hostile minority in Congress, omniscient editors of metro- 
politan papers and partisan demagogues. But Lincoln 
attained heroic proportions in his treatment of Northern 
opposition and Southern rebellion. He took immediate 
and vigorous steps to meet the situation. His call for 75,- 
000 militia and an extra session of Congress; his proclama- 
tion of a blockade of Southern ports, and a demand for 42,- 
000 volunteers, with an increase in the regular army and 
in the naval forces, all followed in rapid succession in less 
than twenty days after Anderson capitulated. Men like 
Seward, Chase, Stanton and McClellan, who were firmly 
convinced that they were the agents of Providence for 
such a time as this to save the country from a well-meaning 
but incapable Executive, were quickly disillusioned and 
did obeisance to one who towered above them all. The 
different schemes of terminating the war, either by recog- 
nizing the insurgent States as an independent confederacy, 
or by granting a temporary truce for subsequent negotia- 
tions, or by restoring them to the Union with compromis- 
ing concessions, were not for a moment considered by the 
Executive. His undaunted spirit inspired the second reso- 
lution of the Republican platform of 1864: "Resolved, 
That we approve the determination of the government of 
the United States not to compromise with rebels or to 
offer them any terms of peace, except such as may be 
based upon an unconditional surrender of their hostility 
and a return to their just allegiance to the Constitution and 
laws of the United States." 

He could not be coerced by reckless radicals, restrained 
by timid conservatives, or disarmed by nerveless moderat- 
ists. With an almost overwhelming sense of responsibility, 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 33 

with a heart-rending sympathy for his bleeding countrymen, 
with malice toward none and with charity for all, with a 
firm conviction of the righteousness of his cause and with 
an unfaltering trust in the truth and justice of the Almighty 
Ruler of the nations, he was guided in word and deed by 
the dictates of his reason and conscience. He was not 
an agent of his cabinet or the servant of his party, but 
the ruler of a divided nation, whose sole purpose was the 
healing of divisions and the restoration of peace and pros- 
perity. His practically unanimous nomination for a second 
term and sweeping victory at the polls, were not only a 
splendid vindication of his statesmanship, but a magnifi- 
cent expression of supreme confidence in his matchless 
manhood by the American people. 

Even the want of time will not permit us to omit the 
consideration of the consummate act of his life, by which 
more than by any other his name will be remembered for- 
ever — the Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln was theo- 
retically and morally an inveterate foe of slavery. His 
whole nature instinctively revolted from it. The practice 
of involuntary servitude he could not reconcile with his 
conception of Divine Justice, human equality and demo- 
cratic government, but as a broadminded and farseeing 
statesman he was no advocate of immediate and arbitrary 
abolition. The responsibility of the existence of slavery 
he did not lay upon the South alone, but upon the whole 
country. In his annual message, December 1, 1862, he 
pleads for compensated emancipation on the ground that 
in a certain sense " the liberation of slaves is the destruction 
of property — property acquired by descent or by purchase, 
the same as any other property." Then he generously dis- 
tributes the burden of responsibility. "It is no less true," 
he says, "for having been so often said that the people of 
the South are not more responsible for the original intro- 



34 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 

duction of this property than are the people of the North, 
and when it is remembered how unhesitatingly we all use 
cotton and sugar and share the profits of dealing in them, 
it may not be quite safe to say that the South had been 
more responsible than the North for its continuance. If, 
then, for a common object this property is to be sacrificed, 
is it not just that it will be done at a common charge?" 
Neither the Republican party nor its successful candidate 
dreamed of interference, directly or indirectly, with the 
institution of slavery in the States where it existed. In the 
political platform and in public utterances care was taken 
to distinguish Republicanism from abolitionism. While 
Lincoln more than once declared that slavery was the 
cause of the war, he none the less resented the imputation 
of the opposition, that war was waged to free the slaves. 
According to Mr. Davis, " the South did not fight for slavery 
but for equality." It is equally true that the North did 
not fight against slavery but against secession and for the 
Union. In reply to the anti-slavery zealots, among whom 
was the impatient editor of the New York Tribune, Lincoln 
clearly defines his position: "My paramount object in this 
struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or 
to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without 
freeing the slave, I would do it, and, if I could save it by 
freeing all the slaves, I would do it, and if I could save it 
by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do 
it. What I do about slavery and the colored race, I do 
because I beHeve it helps to save the Union, and what I 
forbear I forbear because I do not believe it would help to 
save the Union." 

Emancipation was forced upon the president, as com- 
mander-in-chief of the army and navy, by the necessities 
of war. In a short time the Federal camps were filled with 
forsaken and fugitive slaves. What was to be done with 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 35 

them? The Government could neither return them to 
their masters nor keep them in bondage. The insurrec- 
tionists were encouraged and comforted in the hope that 
the border slave States, still loj^al to the Union, would 
eventually cast their lot with the Confederacy and turn the 
tide of war in its favor. The ardent abolitionists impa- 
tiently urged liberation, while loyal and good men of all 
parties strenuously opposed such an extremity. 

The scope of vision, the sense of justice, the subordina- 
tion of personal vievv's to the general welfare, the self-restraint 
and firm resolution of Lincoln, never stood out in bolder 
relief than in the solution of this momentous question. 
He studied and pondered the whole subject long and well. 
He guarded himself against the importunities of enthusiasts 
and was heedless of the fears and warnings of the oppor- 
tunists. At last he was convinced that the hour had come 
and he resolved on liberation. He was not primarily actu- 
ated by moral motives but by military policy. Emancipa- 
tion was a war measure. Still he moved cautiously and 
with a view of winning rather than alienating the slave 
holders. He pleads in vain for compensated emancipation. 
He peremptorily revoked General Hunter's unauthorized 
order of military emancipation. He signed the bill abolish- 
ing slavery in the District of Columbia. He authorized the 
employment of contrabands in the army. He prepared a 
draft of a preliminary emancipation proclamation, giving 
due notice to all the States, whether in or out of the Union, 
that they might obtain the benefits of compensation. Only 
tvv'o members of his cabinet approved this measure. But 
with the impressive tone of a father addressing his son, he 
told them that he had not called them together for advice 
on issuing the proclamation. That matter was decided. 
But he desired their criticism and suggestions on the form 
of the document. Accepting the recommendation of Mr. 



36 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 

Seward, that the pubHcation of it should be postponed 
until it would be supported by military success, he patiently 
waited for reports from the field. The fulness of time was 
at hand when the victory of Antietam revived the drooping 
courage of the North. After a second conference with the 
cabinet and a few slight modifications, the preliminary 
proclamation was announced, September 2, 1862. The die 
was cast. The Confederate States gave no sign of repent- 
ance and spurned the generous offer of compensation. 
True to his announcement, on January 1, 1863, he signed 
the final edict of freedom and the shackles fell from 4,000,- 
000 bondmen forever. The decisive vote of the people in 
the next election, the series of successful battles under the 
leadership of Grant, Sherman and Sheridan, and the rapid 
disintegration of the Confederacy, not only ratified the 
proclamation but enabled the Thirty-eighth Congress to 
make it a part of the organic law of the land, as inscribed in 
the Thirteenth Amendment of the Constitution. 

Perhaps the crowning act of his life, the full bloom of his 
generous, unresenting, pardoning and philanthropic soul, 
was a tentative message addressed to Congress, recommend- 
ing that the slave States be offered a compensation of four 
hundred millions of dollars, upon condition that all rebel- 
lion should cease before April 1, 1865. Then the backbone 
of the rebellion had been broken. When men were thirsting 
for vengeance on a defeated foe; when they were about to 
lay stripes deep and long on the bare back of a rebellious 
people; then Lincoln had "charity for all and malice to- 
ward none." The cabinet, however, to a man disapproved 
the plan. With an expression of surprise and sorrow, 
coming like a cloud over his face, he folded and laid away 
the paper, and with a deep sign he added: "You are all 
opposed to me and I will not send the message." His 
lenient policy was rejected. The war was fought to the 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 37 

bitter end. The plans for the reconstruction of the im- 
poverished, distracted, humihated and embittered South, 
which were ripening in his mind, were defeated by the 
assassin's hand. When Lincoln fell, the rebellious States 
lost their most faithful friend — a friend who groaned and 
agonized in his soul because of their apostasy, and travailed 
and prayed for their return to the government of their 
fathers. When Lincoln fell, the great genius of American 
democracy breathed his last and one of the most distin- 
guished sons of the race passed into the realm of the im- 
mortals. When the stricken chief lay cold in death, the 
leonine Stanton, who had borne with him the burdens of 
war, spoke the judgment of history: "There lies the most 
perfect ruler of men that the world has ever seen." 

He solved the problem which baffled American states- 
men for a century. He transformed the Declaration of 
Independence from a political theory to a national fact. 
He exalted the Constitution as the supreme and inexorable 
law of an indissoluble Union. He convinced the super- 
cilious and skeptical monarchies of the world that govern- 
ment of the people, by the people and for the people shall 
not perish from the earth. He broke the bonds of slavery 
and preserved the integrity of the nation. 

We have traced his life from the cabin in the Western 
forests to the executive mansion at Washington, from the 
first sentence scribbled on a shovel by the hearth to the 
second inaugural, from the abolition sentiment uttered 
before the auction block in New Orleans to the Thirteenth 
Amendment. We have watched the successive steps in 
his career and read nearly all his recorded words, observed 
his treatment of men, friends and foes, and traced his ad- 
ministration of affairs in the dark days of the war until he 
died a martyr to the cause for which he lived. We have a 
feeling akin to that of the traveler who stands for the first 



38 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 

time before a towering peak of Switzerland. As his eye 
follows the outline of the monarch of the plain from base to 
summit, and his soul is lifted from the ephemeral to the 
eternal, he forgets the common clay, the flinty rock and the 
barren sides in the contemplation of the massive grandeur 
of the cloud-capped peak. Lincoln stands before us against 
a background of the vast and dim unknown, of the earth 
earthy yet with the glow of heaven on his brow, defying 
analysis, classification and interpretation — an incomparable 
and solitary personality. 

When the fields of a nation were tinged with blood, when 
the demons of war stalked with hellish glee over the ruins 
of blooming gardens, golden harvests and thriving hamlets, 
and the cry of the widow and orphan filled the land, when 
victory was in his grasp and the plaudits of an exalted 
people were breaking forth — then Lincoln reveals the 
secret of his life in the words of his great second inaugural : 
"Fondly we hope, fervently do we pray that this mighty 
scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet if God wills 
that it continue until all the wealth built by the bonds- 
man's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil, shall 
be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash 
shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said 
three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, 'The 
judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.' 
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firm- 
ness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us 
strive to finish the work we are in — to bind up a nation's 
wounds and care for him who shall have borne the battle, 
and for his widoAv and his orphans; to do all which may 
achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among om'- 
selves and with all nations." Did ever Jewish prophet or 
Christian apostle, ancient father or modern reformer, utter 
a sublimer faith in Divine Providence and plead with a 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 39 

tenderer love for Christian charity? But the feeble accents 
of sober prose must yield to the keener vision, the finer 
touch and the subtler tones of the poetic muse, to give due 
honor to America's great emancipator: 

"When the Norn Mother saw the Whirlwind Hour 
Gathering and darkening as it hurried on, 
She left the Heaven of Heroes and came down 
To make a man to meet the mighty need. 
She took the tried clay of the common road — 
Clay warm yet with the genial heat of earth, 
Dashed through it all a strain of prophecy, 
Tempered the heap with touch of mortal tears; 
Then mixed a laughter with the serious stuff. 

The color of the ground was in him, the red earth, 

The tang and odor of the primal things — 

The rectitude and patience of the rocks; 

The gladness of the wind that shakes the corn; 

The courage of the bird that dares the sea; 

The justice of the rain that loves all leaves ; 

The pity of the snow that hides all scars ; 

The loving kindness of the wayside well; 

The tolerance and equity of light 

That gives as freely to the shrinking weed 

As to the great oak flaring to the wind — 

To the grave's low hill as to the Matterhorn 

That shoulders out the sky. 

And so he came. 
From prairie cabin up to Capitol, 
One fair ideal led our chieftain on, 
Forever more he burned to do his deed 
With the fine stroke and gesture of a king. 
He built the rail pile as he built the State, 
Pouring his splendid strength through evei\v blow. 
The conscience of him testing every stroke, 
To make his deed the measure of a man. 

So came the Captain with the mighty heart ; 

And when the step of earthquake shook the house, 



40 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 

Wresting the rafters from their ancient hold, 
He held the ridgepole up and spiked again 
The rafters of the Home. He held his place — 
Held the long purpose like a growing tree — 
Held on through blame and faltered not at praise- 
And when he fell in whirlwind, he went down 
As when a kingly cedar, green with boughs, 
Goes down with a great shout upon the hills, 
And leaves a lonesome place against the sky." 

— ^Markham. 



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